“... German language readers, Haushofer’s claim to fame has always been her 1963 novel Die Wand (The Wall), a cult book in some quarters, made into a dutiful movie in 2012, with Martina Gedek, star of The Lives of Others, in the role of a woman who finds herself stranded in the mountains, cut off by a limitless invisible barrier from a world in which everyone ...”

“... paying her. From 1773 until 1775 she lived in a house he rented for her on the fashionable Neuer Wall, and though they did not marry, she bore him two children, both of whom died immediately after birth. The sole condition Sanpelayo imposed on the relationship was that Romellini should have sexual relations with nobody apart from himself. Unfortunately for ...”

“... the bird that caused the opening car accident. They pin bits of food to a pegboard on the wall so that the bird can eat while perching in the manner to which it is accustomed. Stephen names the bird after Rudolf Hess, ‘because its colours were those of a Nazi flag, with black on its chin for the SS in spring’. Then Tiffany tacks on the surname of ...”

“... damp and dilapidated house in Italy with dodgy investments and asset sales, in Davy Chadwick; Richard Verey in Slide, after spells in the Foreign Service and on Wall Street, effectively on the run from himself, finally forced back to what he knows best of all after running out of world: ‘I might not be here, in this ...”

“... the kind of novel that C.J. Koch – of the suitably German name – has delivered. The narrator, Richard Miller, is lame, loses his father in the Second World War, is literary, theatrical, passive, longing to be ‘at one remove’ from everyday life, from Tasmania, where he is looked after by his grandfather, this Karl, an architect and alderman of German ...”

“... Staël edged his way into figuration by first training himself to respect the painting as a wall, then by learning how to create an overall represented space. The depiction of objects came third. Objects could be depicted only when the space into which they were to fit was complete, and this was the point Staël felt he had reached by February 1952. The ...”

“... which had disgraced the British name’.Harrison and others, including his tutor, the Positivist Richard Congreve, sought to disrupt what Burke had called the ‘geographic morality’ that warped people’s capacity to sympathise with the fate of colonial subjects. ‘Open any map of the world,’ Congreve wrote in response to the Sepoy Mutiny, ‘and see ...”

“... Twenty-five years​ after the fall of the Berlin Wall, two major exhibitions in London take stock of German identity, history and memory, each in its own way providing a powerful reminder of the legacies of a contested past in the culture of the reunited Germany of today. One of them, the beguiling exhibition at the British Museum curated by Barrie Cook, displays objects of many kinds, from the wooden sculptures made in the late 15th century by Tilman Riemenschneider to the metallic icon of the Volkswagen Beetle, in order to address the question of Germany’s fragmented sense of itself across the ages ...”

“... the gas war was concerned. Few of the statistics David Stevenson gives in With Our Backs to the Wall, his book about the conduct of the war in 1918, are as striking as those involving poison gas. The Germans released 52,000 tons of gas on the Western Front, twice as much as the French and three and a half times as much as the British, killing or wounding ...”

“... rice inscribed with verse. The show was reviewed on the front page of the New York Times and the Wall Street Journal. The following year he received a prize from the National Small Works Competition, judged by a curator from the Guggenheim Museum.In December 1990 an exhibition was planned for the Museum of Jurassic Technology: in effect a ...”

“... for the Western cinema) always ran past holding our noses. The site at Rievaulx is just over the wall from the abbot’s lodgings, which smelly though medieval abbeys were, must have been hard to take. Coming away we scale the gate again, happy to have outwitted authority, but since all that stands between Open and Closed is a five-bar gate it’s maybe ...”

“... the perimeter and reaches out towards the glass, a hand becomes visible. Where it touches the wall it cuts a track in the condensation. Sometimes faces and bodies loom through the cloud. Get inside the box and as you approach the wall you suddenly become aware of the clear space beyond. The fog has, as it ...”

“... Richard Rayner's new novel, his second, opens with a nervous exhibition of rhetorical trills and twitches, buttonholing the reader like a stand-up comic on his first night:      My name is Headingley Hamer.      Absurd, I admit, but this statement is true, and it’s not that I don’t want to tell this story, nor that l feel impelled to do so and am trying to stop myself, just that I’m having trouble getting going ...”

“... What, for the subject, is it like to be still? As far as one can tell, the gentleman facing Richard Dadd in 1853 had nothing that he wished to project: his attire was dapper, his red locks kempt, but his eyes did no more than attend, uninflectedly staring back at those that analysed him. At the same time the painter, adjusting the tonal weights that ...”

“... or what remains of it, on display nearby, or the hobnailed boot from Vindolanda on Hadrian’s Wall. There’s a certain pathos to the solitary sock: it’s easy to imagine it being overlooked in the hubbub of striking camp and left behind when the legion marched on. But it turns out that’s just my ignorant fantasy, since there’s a pair of almost ...”