“... first minute of Carmen, Falstaff, Der Rosenkavalier and Wozzeck (operas written within the force field of Wagner’s immense influence and yet, in key respects, resisting it) throws into startling relief the distinctive character of Wagner’s compositional procedures. In a minute of Bizet, Verdi, Strauss or Berg, the rapid release of musical information and ...”

“... in any case part of his attraction. I should add that I do not agree with Vendler’s rejection of Andrew Motion’s historicist view of Keats’s poems, in her review of his biography of Keats (LRB, 16 October 1997), and believe that ‘To Autumn’ is on one level a great political poem which elegises those who were massacred at Peterloo. Among the many ...”

“... had designed in Hampshire. Here she was surrounded by dogs, kept goats, had a donkey in the field and painted in a style that was vaguely Russian but which only came into its own when she took up needlework. Her needlework pictures are glowing with colour and intricate in texture, medieval in their richness. It was only in the last ten years or so that ...”

“... for grown-ups. The dog and the train alike are media which circumvent that adult and social field of the novel which in some sense the writer couldn’t do, or didn’t want to. Kipling wanted something else. Even the late dog-stories can, for an impartial sympathy, hit a nerve curiously hard and centrally. These late stories are minimal by the side of ...”

“... or balconies; young people were replacing photographs of themselves with the crescent on a red field in Facebook; night after night, television news was reduced to solemn images of Erdogan and Gul, at the head of a phalanx of army commanders, presiding at the funeral of soldiers killed in the south-east, mothers sobbing over their coffins, intercut with ...”

“... six hundred men to the new techniques of counter-revolutionary warfare, and sent them out into the field the previous week.The following evening, in a café in the central square of Santa Cruz, one of these American officers told us that they had heard on their short-wave radio that Guevara had been captured. ‘He has been wounded,’ we were told, ‘and may ...”

“... Square – a moment almost too complex to be properly grasped in a short extract. There is also Andrew Salkey’s Escape to an Autumn Pavement (1960), a marvellously subtle and original novel about the liminal sexual status of a Jamaican immigrant man, torn between a white boyfriend and an affair with an exploitative landlady.And there is Gillian ...”

“... had graced the state flag since 1879 with the ‘stars and bars’: the blue and white cross of St Andrew on an in-your-face field of bright red. Its Civil War service done, this banner had rallied the Ku Klux Klan as it helped re-establish white power in the South during a half-century reign of terror. When, in 1993, the ...”

“... difficulty,’ James says, ‘would be to make and to keep her so limited consciousness the very field of my picture . . . the one presented register of the whole complexity would be the play of the child’s confused and obscure notation of it.’ Maisie cannot be expected to possess a full understanding of the doings of her divorced parents (‘the ...”

“... claiming that Sulayman was sending Muslims to train in Afghanistan. The Labour MP for Hendon, Andrew Dismore, raised the matter in Parliament. Ten days after the newspaper article was published, Sulayman became the first Muslim to be arrested and detained under the Terrorism Act 2000. He was charged with inviting another to receive weapons training and ...”