“... and straggling villages: from half a mile off it was as remote as a little world inside a blown glass paperweight.’ The realities of life on land, and of the characters whom George has left there, seem pale and undeveloped by comparison with the vividness of life at sea. I am not sure that this is what Raban originally planned. He opens his book with a ...”

“... more like Edward Lear than King Lear. All successful artists view the world through a distorting glass which one can loosely define as style. It is a commonplace that artists make up their own worlds, and Waugh’s hilarious vision of things was so pervasive and distinctive that it could not be contained within the pages of his books. ‘I see nothing ...”

“... to watch over her. It is a familiar scheme in the movies, akin to General Sternwood enlisting Philip Marlowe to take care of his wild daughter in The Big Sleep. And we learned to trust the immaculate Marlowe and to love Bogart playing him, because no matter the fix he’s in, the private eye has a wisecrack and flawless assurance, as well as Lauren Bacall ...”

“... Crombie, pockets filled with crumpled paper and crumbs of chocolate, is the Thanet translation of Philip Marlowe’s trenchcoat. A trip through this territory, guided by the man himself, is both exhilarating and exhausting. He doesn’t talk, he lectures. Loudly. With a full head of steam. Like a man starved of proper conversation, denied an ...”

“... Sevigny), the only other young woman in the town; she helps Tom’s father, Thomas Edison Snr (Philip Baker Hall), with his pills; and she minds Vera’s children, who have names like Achilles, Pandora, Athena and Jason (Vera is played by Patricia Clarkson). Only Vera’s surly husband, Chuck (Stellan Skarsgård), seems resistant to Grace’s ...”

“... arrived two hundred years ago. (Ghosh described the Burmese oil wells in his 2000 novel The Glass Palace, which he quotes from here.) After losing territory to the British in the Second Anglo-Burmese War of 1852-53, King Mindon took control of the Yenangyaung oil fields – ‘effectively nationalising the industry’ – and did a deal with Price’s ...”

“... the ‘aura of frosty English integrity hovering over his skeletal face’ as Deedes ‘lifted his glass of water and sipped it’. Thirteen years after his death she is still chewing over this ‘unpleasant’ encounter which she now attributes to Deedes’s own ‘twilight relationship’ with a much younger writer at the paper. In fact, she had simply dealt ...”

“... theories of The Da Vinci Code and the bestselling soi-disant historical studies that inspired them.Philip Almond surveys the torrent of claims and counterclaims in theological and popular literature across two millennia and sets out to show that Mary Magdalene has always represented ‘the sinner we should aspire not to be and the saint we should desire to ...”

“... light. The bright golds and scarlets of the religious pictures on the walls had faded, their glass glittered now in the sudden flashes of firelight, and as it deepened the dusk turned reddish from the Sacred Heart lamp that burned before the small wickerwork crib of Bethlehem on the mantelpiece. Only the cups and saucers laid ready on the table for their ...”

“... advanced are exactly the same as those of the equally sincere worshippers who wanted the stained-glass windows smashed in the 17th century or the rood loft removed in 1559. It didn’t suit their style of worship either. 4 July, Yorkshire. To Menwith Hill just outside Harrogate, where the veteran campaigner Lindis Percy has asked me to take part in an ...”

“... speech in the poetry of Sylvia Plath, as you can see the reef below you if you move over it in a glass-bottomed boat. Yet Plath seldom assumes the regularities of absolute metre. Auden’s and Fenton’s poetry employs regular metre and rhyme on many occasions, but does not seem archaic, whereas much of Other Passports (and not just the necessary journeyman ...”

“... Style reached its glory period with the vertical cities designed by Sullivan, Mies van der Rohe, Philip Johnson, Henry-Russell Hitchcock. The Philadelphia Savings Fund Society Building, the Rockefeller Center, the UN Secretariat Building, Lever House and the Seagram Building were visually stunning statements of corporate power and prevailed by making the ...”

“... so she must be fine. She and Charles signed the register on a little table below a stained glass window bearing the legend of George V and the year 1951, when Charles was three years old and his mother was four years married, still a princess in a world before British steel bands and Cliff Richard. ‘Here they come,’ the BBC said. ‘Oh, they look a ...”

“... journal. They also struck me as a bit chippy – like Iofur Raknison, the armoured bear in Philip Pullman’s His Dark Materials who wants to have a daemon of his own, so he too can be human, but has to be content with playacting with a puppet. But I have to admit that, after attending to their shouts and murmurs, I’ve been won over to their view. In ...”

“... poems appeared he appalled friends by marrying Jane, the daughter of a stable keeper, and then got Philip Webb to build the Red House for his family just south of London. Although once canonised as the first modernist dwelling on account of its simple layout and truth to materials, Morris described it as ‘very medieval in spirit’. Perhaps too ...”