“... the master of a workshop, a master worker, a master artisan’. Italo Calvino said Barthes’s field was the science of the single object, the art of generalising where only the particular was in play. This was ‘the great thing that he – I do not say taught us, because one can neither teach nor learn this – but showed us is possible’. Louis-Jean ...”

“... of individuals who later had significant roles in the Nazi Party, including Rudolf Hess, Hans Frank and Alfred Rosenberg. After considering in more detail the Nazi Party’s use of demonising supernatural imagery to win over voters, the book moves in its second part to explore the Third Reich leadership’s relationship with magic and the occult and the ...”

“... So​ I have sailed the seas and come … to B … a small town fastened to a field in Indiana,’ the late, great William Gass began his imperishable short story ‘In the Heart of the Heart of the Country’, from 1968. Or, with his and your permission, ‘I have sailed the seas and come … to G … a healthcare mecca and football burg that was previously a town with a university that began life as a plant-breeding institute, and before that a railway-and-turpentine camp glued to a pine swamp in Florida,’ as Lauren Groff and I (separately) have done, perhaps a dozen years ago in her case, more than two dozen now in mine ...”

“... much sitting around in cars, parked or stuck in slow-moving traffic; a couple of walks across a field to a barn – all described in the careful, even, unostentatious, curiously compelling sentences that have served Ishiguro so well for nearly forty years. The dramatic centrepiece of Never Let Me Go is a visit to a second-hand shop in Cromer.It’s not a ...”

“... towns – an example, Goebbels said, of ‘England’s assassination of European culture’. Hans Frank, governor general of Nazi-occupied Poland, said his aim was ‘to elevate the Polish people to the honour of European civilisation’, even as he trashed and looted the vast art collections of the Polish aristocracy, banned performances of Chopin and sent ...”

“... also had two children). Di Prima wrote plays, acted, directed and produced. They put on dramas by Frank O’Hara and Robert Duncan at various downtown venues and broadcast Antonin Artaud’s radio piece ‘To Have Done with the Judgment of God’, complete with ‘gongs and blood-curdling screams’, to the whole of Bleecker Street. In 1965 di Prima founded ...”

“... whether respecting himself or others. In his own case he has to cope with his biographer Andrew Field, his commerce with whom deteriorates swiftly and with cause, from the co-operative to the adversarial, to the point where, by 1973, Nabokov is telling one of his Russian correspondents: ‘His version of my life has turned out to be cretinous. I have had to ...”

“... Company knew next to nothing of the country where they were posted, and so had no immunity to the field-canteen culture of the American Army. ‘When they arrived in Vietnam, they went along with what they found, partly because they were scared, partly because they didn’t know any better, and partly because no one told them differently. The war culture that ...”

“... exercise), and the clues he offers come right at the end of the book, by which time, to be frank, our interest in the question has flagged. Brought up in the comfortable affluence of his family hotel, showered with love and gifts, and urged on (but not unpleasantly) by his parents’ vicarious hopes, he grew up a ‘crown prince’. Graduates of the ...”

“... herself a ‘woman photographer’ and had little to do with other women working in the same field. Some of her closest relationships were with women, and yet her behaviour was often dismayingly competitive, at least as soon as any possibility of sexual rivalry arose. For instance, she backed a photograph she had taken of the wife of a close friend ...”

“... this is current Victorian usage because Thackeray was a Victorian. Surtees’s love of the hunting-field and stable raises other complications. There is no doubt that a novel like Mr Sponge’s Sporting Tour reflects a range of the horsey slang used by men among men. But, funny as the expostulation is, can one accept as plausible the ‘hard-swearing’ Earl ...”

“... the word processor to marshal his text, the computer to prepare distributional maps, and trained field-workers – 80in all – to go forth and gather information, the sheer slow-budging burden of such a work is almost as cumbersome as it would have been in Joseph Wright’s day. The central corpus of data has been furnished by informants responding to a ...”

“... doesn’t mention this book, and indeed seems almost completely ignorant of previous work in his field. He fails to overturn the verdict of another standard work, Die Herren Journalisten (2002), by Lutz Hachmeister and Friedemann Siering, who conclude that Zehrer ‘did everything’ to push the Nazis into power. As Ossietzky wrote, he ‘out-Hitlered ...”

“... US military and the CIA were confident that it would not, but two of the British Chiefs of Staff, Field Marshal Slim and Sir John Slessor, warned that ‘there was a real likelihood and danger of the Chinese taking this action.’ A million-strong Chinese Army duly flung the US back, Truman began fingering the nuclear trigger and Attlee flew in panic to ...”

“... that it was extremely unlikely the disease could jump to humans. This is a surprisingly frank admission, but perhaps less so for a scientist working in Brahic’s field. Prion research is characterised by unexpected observations that seem to violate the scientific consensus. How and why do proteins, which are ...”