“... the genteel to the north and the commercial to the south. The cafés are nearly all bad, the pubs close too early, the restaurants have been here for ever without much improving (sometimes declining). The architecture, in its variety, attests to changes made long ago. The thoroughfare of New Oxford Street sliced through the St Giles slums, the infamous ...”

“... in The Little Pastry Cook (c.1922-23), which otherwise pursue their own painterly logic; seen in close-up they could easily have been made a few decades later, and it is no surprise to learn that New York School painters such as William de Kooning and Lee Krasner were fans. The white shirt of Pastry Cook of Cagnes (also c.1922-23) reveals transparent ...”

“... but she was reluctant to let clichés about the natural world attach themselves to her work. Frank O’Hara sent a letter within days of reading the interview, to congratulate ‘ma Baudelairienne actuelle’ on the central picture, George Went Swimming at Barnes Hole, But It Got Too Cold, which he said he longed to see again. He was too ...”

“... and the accident (and the birthday cake that was not picked up), for example – Altman is very close to Carver’s material; in others – the story of the couple who look after another couple’s apartment is one – he takes the faintest starting clue; in others – say the story of the wife’s old infidelity – the basic situation. This is ...”

“... Inspiring amazement by the use of an epistemologically destabilising style might be altogether too close to inspiring dismay as an equivocating malcontent. Biester is fascinating, too, on the decline of this literary and social milieu under James and Charles (whose court masques sought a royal monopoly on the wonderful), and his conclusion clearly exemplifies ...”

“... St in 1950, the year before Schuyler’s breakdown, Schuyler met John Ashbery, Kenneth Koch and Frank O’Hara, who had been friends at Harvard. The ‘Harvard wits’, he called them. Schuyler had attended Bethany College, a small college in West Virginia affiliated with the Disciples of Christ, where he had devoted himself to bridge and then flunked ...”

“... the founders of their prosperous republic but the peevish Marxists of the Frankfurt School such as Frank Lightner or the revolutionaries of remote and picturesque ex-colonies, the Soviets found a field ripe for subversion and recruitment.’ (Who needs story, with exposition like this?) Between the big players, people like Genscher and Kohl and Petra Kelly and ...”

“... discos, out of earshot. In the council’s large, popular Arts Club (which the Tories want to close), the ‘Heavy Irony’ disco was right at the back of the handsome old building (once a Church-owned college), away from theatre, concert, craft-centres – and residential neighbours. It was the same at the rugby club: the bar was for grown-ups, enormous ...”

“... another to banking. A couple fell into comfortable niches within the academic aristocracy: Frank became a Cambridge botanist and Gwen’s father, George, though he twice failed to win a scholarship to Cambridge, eventually went on to be Plumian Professor of Astronomy there. None of them was short of money, thanks in part to their family connections ...”

“... At the end of May, Frank Schirrmacher, an editor at the Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung, declared in an open letter that he had refused to serialise Martin Walser’s novel Tod eines Kritikers, or ‘Death of a Critic’, on the grounds that it was a ‘document of hatred’, a fantasy ‘execution’ of the literary critic Marcel Reich-Ranicki ...”

“... It’s​ 35 years since Blade Runner was released, and we are now very close to 2019, its once futuristic setting. In this framework the sequel seems a bit overdue, and the time of the sequel’s action, 2049, not all that far away. The new movie, directed by Denis Villeneuve, goes out of its way to bypass the first impression and to insist on the second ...”

“... in on the ground by means of an appallingly cheap, lumbering pair of blocks nominally designed by Frank Gehry, seems to go out of its way to hide the enormous brick building. The same effect is created to the west by a slightly less offensive glass wall designed by Foster’s. The only way to see the power station clearly is from the other side of the ...”

“... buildings.The Pritzker Prize juries (this year’s was headed by Lord Rothschild and included Frank Gehry, who won the prize in 1989) have, over the years, chosen a significant number of winners (Gehry, Rem Koolhaas and now Hadid) whose reputations, at the time of the award, depended to a great extent on small buildings or on their contributions to a ...”

“... the theatre. Similarly dramatic transformations are to be repeated in other parts of the city. Frank Gehry has designed an enormous complex of shops, a basketball stadium and apartments to be built over marshalling yards in Brooklyn. Many residents are against the Gehry construction, though it is not the development itself that is likely to kill the ...”

“... attainments as a novelist, for a restless cast of mind makes conclusion difficult. Her books close in suspension, undetermined possibilities circulating in final paragraphs. Mantel’s earliest solution to this perplexity must have seemed obvious: the sequel. Her first novel, Every Day is Mother’s Day (an irresistibly grim study of family wrongs), was ...”