“... ruling out the possibility that the spores of C. fraxinea, like the midges that carry Bluetongue, may well cover long distances in the right circumstances – a good breeze over a mass of warm water, between the Dutch coast and the coast of Suffolk, say. Finally the fungus is not easy to identify: it is a close relative, or possibly a pathogenic phase, of ...”

“... where distinctions between hand and machine are difficult to recover. In different ways, Warhol, Richard Hamilton, James Rosenquist, Gerhard Richter and Sigmar Polke produce a related conundrum of the painterly and the photographic; it is a prime characteristic of Pop art at its best.Lichtenstein’s work abounds in manually made signs of mechanically ...”

“... to Moscow and back and was the only plane with the proven ability to deliver an atomic bomb. This may well have been decisive in persuading Stalin to back down. It was the world’s first example of nuclear diplomacy – and it worked. More important than Bevin’s amour-propre was a constant worry about American unreliability. ‘The Americans,’ according ...”

“... the tongue: Jean-Noël Vuarnet, Sylviane Agacinski, Jim West, Mary McCarthy, Gregory Mazurovsky, Richard Foreman, Kate Manheim, Louis and Zuka Mittelberg, Bruno Marcenac, Michel Loriod, Maurice Roche), he now can see that all the high-flown references he had barely understood – to Barthes, Foucault, Derrida, Lacan – were no more than intellectualising ...”

“... before the war and advocated a federation of the world’s democracies, attracted the Tory MP Richard Law as well as supporters as diverse and unlikely as Bevin and the free-market economist Friedrich Hayek. Another groupuscule, Union and Reconstruction, foresaw a national rebirth which would end unemployment and hunger. This was outlined in the polemic ...”

“... was declared.My father wanted his first child to be a boy.Barbara Holly Goldin. Date of birth: 21 May 1946.Sex: female.Family photographs arrange themselves on the three screens, supplemented by Goldin’s more recent pictures. She tells us that Barbara started playing the piano at the age of four and taking lessons aged six. She liked to mother, and later ...”

“... and very unreliable; Ian Mikardo: I don’t know much about him, but have sometimes wondered; Richard Crossman: ??Political climber. Zionist (appears sincere about this). Too dishonest to be outright FT. Nearly all of this, however, has been known about for years and made use of in biographies of Orwell. So, too, have the Notes on which he based his Home ...”

“... Monk, Joan Jonas), weaving the naked body through a world of charged theatrical props (Richard Foreman, Robert Wilson) and exploring sado-masochism reminiscent of Surrealism (Gina Pane, Valie Export). Given the ephemerality of ‘performance’ as a medium, it was natural that these artists would either turn to a recording medium like video or ...”

“... and work as separate units. At worst, they read like a cross between R.D. Laing’s case-notes and Richard Aldington’s Imagism. At best, they have a force and integrity which none of the other poets associated with the Review, and few poets since, have come close to matching. The problem, as Hamilton concedes in his preface, is that these 50 poems encompass ...”

“... was elected with Dickens), Babbage’s parties (to which he took his sister ‘that she may see the World’) and dinners with the literati, including Carlyle, who nauseated Darwin with his bombastic mysticism. There are darker moments too: Emma’s worry over his religious doubt, and Darwin, intermittently ill, fearing that he would do no more in ...”

“... is caught and let loose for the pleasure of chasing it down again. With every chorus Bob Dylan and Richard Manuel lift their voices and then abandon them, stranding their words right at the edge of a cliff, suspending the sound in dead silence until the next verse begins. It’s a stark, shuddering effect, the pleasure cut like a heater in a cheap hotel ...”

“... every visitor as if they were a ten-year-old on a school project. On the other hand, while we may enjoy the theatricality of Strong’s remake and welcome the reminders about when and where the Battle of Newbury was, we inevitably regret the removal of large numbers of paintings to make way for all these trimmings and chafe at the intrusive packaging of ...”

“... and pictorial detail that allows Davis to claim (I borrow the formulation from a famous remark of Richard Wright about horror) not that he has invented magic realism, but that Southern Californian magic realism has invented him. But sometimes, it now seems, the image that lodges with such conviction in Davis’s mind and in this book has undergone creative ...”

“... as ‘naive’: surely he was no more so than the sixth-century bishop Gregory of Tours? Indeed he may well still be being widely read as authoritative in some quarters, just as the Le Pens of this world will go on reading Gregory and his modern retailers because it suits their purposes. Ethnicity is ‘impervious to mere rational disproof’. This is why ...”

“... be a biographical dictionary of an array of fictional characters from great movies: the likes of Richard Blaine and Ilsa Lund, George Bailey, Travis Bickle and Norman Bates, who turn out, in the interstices of the entries, to have entangled lives and a dark plot all of their own. If only Howard Hawks wasn’t dead and had made a movie of Suspects we could ...”