“... appear until 1838. When it came to scholarly editions, the Americans were again the first in the field: in 1896 a Boston publisher (Ginn) brought out the first annotated Sartor, edited by the Canadian German scholar and essayist Archibald MacMechan, who provided much-needed assistance with the densely allusive text. Even as Norwood was charting the decline ...”

“... fathers and sons, sisters and brothers’. Most were written by established names, among them Frank Conroy, Stuart Dybeck, Richard Ford, Joyce Carol Oates, Robert Stone and Amy Tan. Those writers known partly for formal experimentation whose work Wolff did include (among them Lorrie Moore, Denis Johnson and Mary Robison) did not, in the stories Wolff ...”

“... preparations, especially the organising and funding of transport fleets, and action once in the field, are critically reviewed, notably in the case of Louis IX’s crusades, when ‘meticulous preparation’ slipped all too easily into the counting of chickens before they were hatched; and the intricate politics of the East are dissected with relish in a ...”

“... of Surrealism for feminist art and theory, which took up the question of ‘sexuality in the field of vision’ in the 1980s (as Jacqueline Rose referred to it then). In any case, today the women of Surrealism are esteemed as much as the men, if not more. Meret Oppenheim received a major retrospective last year, and women Surrealists featured prominently ...”

“... out that court records show the working classes were just as up for it. Douglas Plummer, in his frank book Queer People (1963), insisted that ‘for every Hugh Walpole there are many thousands of ordinary labourers or lorry drivers or salesmen who are also homosexual.’ It’s a world where Walpole is still a touchstone, of class, artistic status and, 22 ...”

“... The two correspondents should have interests in common and should be able to be brutally frank.’ One of his earliest modifications to his epistolary contract with Hale was to suggest that ‘now that there is more communication between us, I feel that I must be frank.’ Spontaneity was a contact sport, and ...”

“... experience it as strangely empty. Even on the first day of the Battle of the Somme, a British field artillery officer looking towards the German trenches could see ‘not a single soldier ... not a movement of any sort’. A British parachutist in combat in 1982 reported: ‘I didn’t really see any Argies properly until they’d started surrendering ...”

“... IV. One of them shows Johann Baptist Eichelsdörfer, the camp commandant, standing amid a field of dead inmates with an odd expression on his face – irritated or peeved. Were Salinger and Fitzgerald there that day? Did they see Eichelsdörfer? We don’t know. But whatever Salinger saw would have helped him to imagine what had happened to the girl ...”

“... by his preliminary sketches, some of them so rough and full of energy they’re reminiscent of Frank Auerbach, though none of this dash survives into the finished portraits. Occasionally funny, too, particularly a sketch of Two Lovers Startled by a Young Person, a child gazing at a snogging couple.22 March. Good example of journalistic spite last week ...”

“... season when the Sabbath came in early, my school was instructed that I had to leave the football field at 3.30. There were plenty of other Jewish boys there – the school was in Brondesbury – but I was the one who bore the brand. Was my father even aware of what a sissy I was constantly being made to look by his beliefs? If he had been, would it have made ...”

“... details but not very interested in what they meant. Not even Theodor Mommsen could rescue the field, although he managed to place epigraphy at the centre of ancient historical studies.As well as this antiquarian taint, there is also the whiff of trade: academic numismatists have to rub shoulders with amateurs, many of whom possess great technical ...”

“... these terrestrial commitments. In her accompanying letter the comically obtuse Ethel struggled to field Harris’s demands for information about her brother’s intellectual development (‘I wouldn’t have thought Ern was interested in architecture and art as you say,’) but did at least reveal that he was ‘a great reader’ and ‘often used to go to ...”

“... the very top of the pile. Frick had been a senior Bavarian administrator, Ley came from IG Farben, Frank and Goebbels had good university records and ‘would have succeeded in any field or calling’. Hess, Kater notes, would probably have become a professor in Munich, although the author’s earlier remarks about Bavaria ...”

“... German critics; they concentrate rather selectively on minor and largely non-dramatic works. As Frank Trommler says in a sceptical Afterword (to my mind, the most perceptive part of the book), these essays show ‘to what a large degree his work is used as a vehicle for contemporary concerns, to what extent he is cast as a guru for artistic ...”

“... response to a wound on the communal body. A recent profile in the New Yorker detailed some of the field research she did before she began to write, including two visits to Nigeria.Officials from the Irish Embassy picked her up. Her first ambition was to ‘meet girls who will tell me their story’, she recalled. O’Brien told me that she wanted ‘their ...”