“... also had something to do, on the other hand, with the two most terrifying and exciting images in Thomas Craven’s Treasury of Art Masterpieces: with Fouquet’s Agnès Sorel as the Virgin, where the sitter’s globular white breast thrusts it-self provocatively out at the viewer above a tightly-laced bodice; and with Grünewald’s green, twisted, lacerated ...”

“... Thomas Hardy once told Robert Graves how he had gone to the Oxford English Dictionary to confirm the existence of a dialect word he proposed to use in a poem, and came to a standstill because the only authority quoted for it was his own Under the Greenwood Tree. This is an acute case of our dependence on dictionaries, and illustrates the commonest reason for resorting to them ...”

“... skulduggery, scams and religions, ditto. Dirt-poor, barefoot, backwoods Florida (the subject of Frank Conroy’s memoir of the 1930s and 1940s, Stop-Time) is not all that long gone. Sweet tea, squirrel and grits Florida. Then, successively, railroads, oranges, real estate, wintering place, destination for domestic and foreign tourism, and retirement ...”

“... a day. He seems to have suffered from anxiety and depression throughout his life and was quite frank about it in public, explaining that mental illness was like any other kind of illness and that those who suffered from it shouldn’t be ostracised. He seems never to have suffered another major episode. The most fascinating sections of Guralnick’s book ...”

“... In​ The World Is Flat, published in 2005, Thomas Friedman argued that global trade and finance, presided over by international institutions – the IMF, the World Bank, the WTO – were making the planet not only richer but less hierarchical and unequal. This was a pumped-up version of the Enlightenment theory of doux commerce, which held that growing trade, founded on mutually beneficial contracts and the rule of law, would provide opportunity and riches for all, and eventually consign wars, empires and great-power politics to the past ...”

“... theory of history similar to that of Vico and taken over by Matthew Arnold from his father Thomas: the fifth century BC, when Greek religion was challenged by the Greek enlightenment, was often held to correspond with the period when the modern Enlightenment was challenging Christianity. The third method depended upon Comte’s theory of the three ...”

“... several unpublished novels: the incomplete ‘Who Else Is Rank?’, written in 1944-45 with E. Frank Coles, a fellow officer in the Army Signals Corps; ‘The Legacy’, written in 1948-49, and ‘rejected by, I think, 14 publishers’ (its protagonist is ‘Kingsley Amis’, like the character ‘Martin Amis’ in Money); or the unfinished ‘Difficulties ...”

“... found which named the Guggenheim as a target. Two years earlier, when the Foundation’s director, Thomas Krens, was finalising a deal with the Basque authorities, he received a letter from Herri Batasuna (HB), the party widely regarded as ETA’s political wing, asking him to postpone the project until a more inclusive consultation about the museum’s ...”

“... Hemingway in Key West; the most appropriate Stevens’s refusing to speak at a memorial for Dylan Thomas, whom he thought of as ‘an utterly improvident person’.Stevens, trained as a lawyer, worked for most of his life for the Hartford Accident and Indemnity Company. He was born in 1879, of Dutch-German descent, in Reading, Pennsylvania; attended ...”

“... comes from Miles Davis. ‘If you’re not nervous, you’re not paying attention.’ It was Frank O’Hara, in his pseudo-manifesto ‘Personism’ (1959), who first advised poets just to run on their nerve, and in recent years, alas, the sub-O’Hara poem has become commonplace – a dash of surrealism, a dash of mock-bravado, a dash of whimsy, a dash ...”

“... past decades have not, strictly speaking, either claimed to be English or cared to be thought so. Frank Kermode, Raymond Williams and Terry Eagleton are proud of their Manx, Welsh and Irish roots. As a result, each one’s journey from the periphery to the centre, from the working-class outskirts of English culture to its middle and upper-class core, from ...”

“... to the social and cultural life of objects. In novels by William Dean Howells, Theodore Dreiser, Frank Norris, Kathleen Thompson, Henry James, Edith Wharton and others, the encounter with technology is a small step taken, often regardless, on a journey defined by an ever-shifting horizon of expectations and disappointments. Only in retrospect do we ...”

“... on the door. On the step is a man barred from the house: Richmond Roy, his features ‘exceedingly frank and cheerful’. He wants to see his wife. According to her father, the expostulatory Squire Beltham (a descendant of Fielding’s Squire Western), she returned to the family home years earlier after finding Roy to be ‘a liar and a beast’, and has since ...”

“... with the clouds scudding over the top. We passed into Scotland and saw a sign for Ecclefechan, ‘Thomas Carlyle’s birthplace’ as one of those brown signs reminded us. Karl thought the town might offer the chance of a sandwich. We slipped off the motorway and inched through the ordered trees to the town, which seemed like it had been put to sleep some ...”

“... a monograph on the American architect’s work ends with the comment: ‘I have seen buildings of Frank Lloyd Wright’s that I would like to touch with the enchanted wand, not to alter their structure in plan or form or carcass, but to clothe them with a more living and tender detail.’ This truth to the ideals of a handcrafted world, and the social ...”