“... of Art in Santa Fe (until 18 October), is a monumental head on a pedestal. The head has a band of black across the eyes, a row of five topknots marching from forehead to nape, and a pattern of spikes on a looped line across the hairless skull. It’s glossy raku ceramic, white with blue glaze dripping like fine rain across the head and face, and represents a ...”

“... is odd, because swooping down on him is a monstrous eagle bolted together from shards of gleaming black metal, its features convulsed into a mask of malevolence, its talons poised to snatch the orb. The young man is the archangel Gabriel, newly engaged as patron and symbol of the Magyar nation. The eagle (though it bears an uncanny resemblance to the bird ...”

“... Professor Vendler’s soul is in peril. Reviewing Black American broadsides in 1974, she found it ‘sinful that anthologies and Collected Works should betray the poems they print by jamming them together and running them into one another.’ Yet here is her Faber Book, a self-confessed anthology which, attempting to present 35 poets ‘whole’, aspires to be a collection of Collecteds ...”

“... shoulders fearfully. No cars or cabs, but police are everywhere. In the distance I see a huge black blob disfiguring the sky. Maybe a thunderstorm’s brewing? I step in front of a fleeing office worker: ‘Excuse me, but has something happened?’ His answer comes out as barely comprehensible comic-book babble: ‘The World Trade Center has been hit ...”

“... it was the largest chemical factory in the world, creating a lot of wealth for Glasgow and a sky black with fumes. The next Tennant, John, went on developing, expanding and diversifying the business, which already had a branch in the City of London. A multi-millionaire by the age of 25, John was a typical early Victorian entrepreneur, perhaps not even all ...”

“... time of the great 18th-century landscape gardeners and on through Robinson and Jekyll right up to Christopher Lloyd and Beth Chatto. The highest achievement in gardening, even when plots are small, has always been seen as the creation of a picture. Gardens in which plants are grown for food, medicine or animal feed have their traditions, but their look is ...”

“... Stoke’ begins, ‘I have lived in a single landscape,’ but quickly divides this ground of grey-black by noticing ‘Discouraged greennesses, lights from a pond or two’; after ‘cindery inbetweens’ come hills which ‘swell up’ and are ‘free of it’. Tomlinson turns to this residual and resurgent nature in ‘The Marl Pits’ for what was, after ...”

“... us believe that the sentimentalities of A.A. Milne, so greatly in evidence throughout the Pooh and Christopher Robin saga, are never very far removed in spirit from an adult mockery of the whole business of childhood. Milne, he says, is simultaneously sentimentalist and scoffer, and his own undercover approach makes parodies of his style redundant. (Parodists ...”

“... they could still find villages like those Tacitus had described if they walked in the contemporary Black Forest. More remarkably still, they could find them in New England as well: ‘The little settlement unconsciously reverted to the forms of village community life, and the Germania of Tacitus was more than suggested in the town at Quinnipiac.’ The ...”

“... papers). Valerie Eliot has now allowed the entire notebook to be published, superbly edited by Christopher Ricks, whose T.S. Eliot and Prejudice is still the most acute and fine-grained investigation of the vexed question of the place of prejudice in Eliot’s writing.It is impossible to over-praise Ricks’s work in this edition. His annotations draw on ...”

“... inconclusive experiments with the more extreme evidences of perversion’, and bought his first black leather jacket. ‘I’m not sure what it meant to me,’ he said of the jacket: ‘I couldn’t say. I thought I was the only pervert in the world.’ After all this, he wrote in the summer of 1956, ‘San Francisco seems a let down.’ The first dedicated ...”

“... invited his friend Isherwood to join him in Berlin. Thirty-five years later, in his autobiography Christopher and his Kind, Isherwood wrote: ‘To Christopher, Berlin meant Boys.’ But in the same book he also points out that Auden ‘had now begun to write lines which are like the slogans of a psychiatric doctor about to ...”

“... fairly sure to hear of in the course of his schooling, you would be wise to put your money on Sir Christopher Wren. I think the equivalent holds good in Turkey. At least, I am writing this review in a school exercise-book I bought in Istanbul: the front cover bears a portrait of Mimar Sinan, and its reverse side gives a brief biography and enumerates the ...”

“... are vague. All we really know of them is their names: ‘Purple Code’ and the extra elusive ‘Black Code’. The focus is on the genius cryptographer himself, Rong Jinzhen, an obsessive number-cruncher who singlehandedly saves the day through his work in a mysterious intelligence unit called 701. Towards the end of the book he loses one of the precious ...”

“... William Heinemann, who eventually published it, initially objected that Victoria, dome-shaped in black with a white feathered bonnet, looked like a tea cosy. By 1897 the ‘Good Queen and Empress’, a fixture in the mind’s eye of three generations, did look like a tea cosy and was as reassuringly familiar. The print struck the balance between respect and ...”