“... time we got to Belfast the whole of Ireland would be under wraps like, as I said, ‘one of your man’s landscapes’. ‘Your man’s? You don’t mean Christo’s?’ In ‘Sushi’, the most brilliant of Muldoon’s many restaurant poems, he detaches himself in an equally effective way from his fancy, by inching it ...”

“... in Moore’s first book, Self-Help (1985), in which Charlene is having an affair with a married man. He rings her while she’s at work: ‘Hi, this is Attila,’ he says in a false deep voice when you pick up your office phone. Giggle. Like an idiot. Say: ‘Oh. Hi, Hun.’ It’s the sort of practised gag that takes two: set-up, punchline, a bit of ...”

“... storm was a ‘once in a generation’, ‘once in a lifetime’ or ‘once in a century’ event. Ray Nagin, the mayor of New Orleans at the time, bears some of the responsibility: ‘The city has never seen a hurricane of this magnitude hit it directly,’ he told any journalist who would listen. But this was nonsense. Katrina was not even a once in forty ...”

“... remains a fertile Arcadia.’ Nor do his portraits of these years reveal worries or anxieties. The Man with a Quilted Sleeve (recently identified conclusively as a member of the Barbarigo family) and the Schiavona appear supremely calm and confident, more so indeed than any other sitters among the many portraits in the National Gallery. How Titian came to ...”

“... but also representations of death in the Third World: starving children, soldiers in Africa, a man pleading for his life beside a car in which a woman has been shot dead. At one point, Travis, played by Malcolm McDowell, passing the vodka to his friends, Johnny and Wallace (David Wood and Richard Warwick), asks: ‘When do we live? That’s what I want to ...”

“... and sat under the flat overhead light refreshing feeds on my laptop. This was not a way to live. A man would go to a bar alone, I told myself. So I went to a bar alone. I sat on a stool at the centre of the bar, ordered a beer, and refreshed the feeds on my mobile. I waited for something to happen. A basketball game played on several monitors at once. The bar ...”

“... of officers being ‘under fire’. Among those gunned down was a severely mentally disabled man called Ronald Madison: police shot the unarmed African-American in the back, kicking him as he died. The police also killed 17-year-old James Brissette and wounded four of his companions as they crossed a bridge looking for food. They too were black and were ...”

“... galleries is less clear. Like van Meegeren, he became a kind of Robin Hood folk hero, the little man – and nearly all forgers, at least those who’ve been caught, are men – against the establishment.But the forger’s forger, strongly represented in the show, struck a different pose. Eric Hebborn was an alumnus of the Royal Academy, a friend of Anthony ...”

“... to meet their curiosity, communicating their technical work with verve – as the biographers Ray Monk and Cheryl Misak have done.Kitcher is right, too, that synthetic philosophy gets short shrift. Philosophers are reluctant to offer world-formulas. This is due in part to humility, but it also reflects one of the pathologies Kitcher identifies. An ...”

“... living in England and France and dreaming of the frontier, the second by a self-described ‘man without a country’, an American brought up in England and Ireland who, writing in Los Angeles, longed for the country from which he had exiled himself. We are undergoing a Chandler revival. The Library of America has published his complete works in two ...”

“... in a bedroom adorned with photographs of the Third Reich movie star Heinz Rühmann (alongside Ray Milland and Deanna Durbin), and devoured the weekly Dutch film magazine, devoted largely to German releases, that the family’s helpers brought her. One of them, Frank records in a 1944 diary entry, teased that she ‘wouldn’t need to go to the movies ...”

“... The middle-aged man sat with his head bowed, flattening his face against his palms. ‘Lots of tears, lovely stuff,’ murmured the cameraman. The presiding judge had given us permission to film ‘arrivals’ at the trial of 53-year-old Polish national Krzysztof Chmist, appearing in court with two fellow countrymen at Bochum in the German industrial region of the Ruhr ...”

“... accept, priding myself on my fidelity to ancient practice, are broken every day by the Man on the Clapham Omnibus and even by the Ordinary Secretary of State in the Street. ‘Her doctor convinced her to see a specialist’ is now acceptable English. I am of course enraged; I pleasurably fulminate: but there is nothing I can do about a shift of ...”

“... and somewhat untypical of her normal run, in that ‘Christmas Tree’ centres firmly on a man. We follow Brian’s career from the condition of engaged Sixties Northern dramatist to cushy, artistic degeneration in Seventies London. The overlaid image is that of the childhood Christmas tree, whose roots his parents used to keep fresh and alive in ...”

“... as Rogers points out, the view that the town, not the country, was ‘the true scene for a man of letters’. At University College he transformed the department, first by appointing Stuart Hampshire, who happened to have been the co-respondent when Ayer divorced his first wife. Three years later he recruited Richard Wollheim from Oxford, but ...”