“... of its original components. Palms can be replaced by propagation, but curvilinear wrought-iron and glass buildings which pre-date the Crystal Palace, of which this was a unique survival, sadly can’t. Quite another sort of approach is to be found in Albion Urdank’s book. An American scholar of enormous curiosity and industry has taken a vacuum-cleaner to ...”

“... have done, no one knows why The Bible Store respires in its sanctum As if in an outsize black glass humidor This is a sacred ground, a holy place 4 a.m. in a sacred place I can tell this is a sacred place, I needn’t be told It’s in the air I feel it This old heritage hotel, this is a sacred place The tour buses are lined up outside it Awaiting the ...”

“... the saddest museum I had ever seen. The reason it lurks in the entrance to a mall – just a few glass-fronted displays of old shirts, balls and assorted memorabilia for people to glance at on their way to spend money on something else – is that Maris made it clear before his death from lymphoma at the age of 51 that he didn’t want anyone to make a ...”

“... detachment from the surrounding world and a dismaying evasiveness in personal matters. A Ringing Glass would be the perfect title for an account of such a life if all it evoked was a hollow vessel and its power of eerie resonance. But Prater, who has lifted the words from one of the Sonnets to Orpheus – Be here among the vanishing in the realm of ...”

“... The poet is not a poet in Ruth Prawer Jhabvala’s new novel, and the dancer is not a dancer. ‘Although her movements were always the same – she waved her arms above her head, she ran now to the right of the room, now to the left – her audience obligingly saw what she wanted them to see. She was pleased, she ran faster, she attempted to spin round; her tread was not light, and she was flustered and breathing hard ...”

“... him than cause him grief or loss. In his working life he was rarely without champions, his mother Ruth being the first (however unwelcome she was in the role of booster). For a diffident man he had many friends, and for a difficult writer he had many readers. As an Australian writer he was English enough to reassure the English and exotic enough to interest ...”

“... whether or not to break it off. So he sought advice in a distinctively modern way: he wrote to Ruth English, agony aunt of Everybody’s, a weekly tabloid. Advice columns very quickly became common in British newspapers and magazines in the late 1930s. Though the concept of the agony aunt extended as far back as the 17th century, it took the launch of the ...”

“... beat. In the 1960s, he lived close to the Glasgow School of Art, where he trained in stained glass and mural-making, and he often walked along the canal, past Sighthill, Pinkston and Port Dundas, gathering up its sooty buildings and besuited young bucks as material for his paintings and murals. By the end of the decade, the M8 had slashed through the ...”

“... the sort of scorn and vitriol that French freethinkers once directed at the Roman Catholic Church. Ruth Harris’s book exemplifies the promise of this approach rather than its excesses. Pasteur appears only incidentally in its pages, yet he lurks behind them, for the book’s great theme is precisely the confrontation between modern, scientific, secular ...”

“... but there is real mystery there at times: looks like them elementals just poured       a glass of blue champagne            and you look up             – silver fizz –           because your body                   is             the stem. I’m very sorry to have to say so, but ...”

“... harlot, Bathsheba who was tempting to King David, Tamar who coaxed her father-in-law – and even Ruth, who crept under the bedclothes of Boaz, her kinsman. Does not this suggest that Matthew wanted to show that Mary was descended from ‘sinners’? This is far-fetched. We are not convinced that Matthew meant his readers to think all these women ...”

“... potential for practical application, “the water temperature will chill the outside of the glass.” ’ Readers of literary prose don’t mind doing a bit of work, but in this book the division of labour between reader and writer is highly unequal. Time spent within the book trying to make sense of basic verbal structures is time taken away from ...”

“... themselves provide one such moment, when Munich juxtaposes a passage from Through the Looking-Glass, in which the Red Queen demonstrates with all her imperious illogic that nights ‘here’ are ‘five times as warm, and five times as cold’ as other places, with an account of Victoria written by her private secretary, Henry Ponsonby: When she insists ...”

“... Scott and Thackeray, but found herself tempted by a few well-bound volumes of poetry kept behind glass in the drawing-room: whenever her parents were in London, she later reported, she would open the bookcase and ‘take delicious draughts of verse’ – Tennyson and Matthew Arnold proving, it seems, ‘all the sweeter for being read in secret’. By her ...”

“... Cranston the Shadow than is good for him. There are a few high points. Edgar gets on the Babe Ruth radio programme. There is a day at the beach and a day in the country. Various fringe members of the family drift in and out of the home, though none of them seems to amount to much. One day, Edgar is held up by two knife-wielding young Nazis. But he ...”