“... of colour. And I am always begging them to exploit the possibilities of drawing. It is the richer field.’ It was his sense of these possibilities that allowed Degas to take the ‘painting of modern life’ indoors, and to restore the primacy of the human figure in his carefully composed pictures of laundresses, drinkers, bathers, café ...”

“... Julia took out a bank loan and established her own experimental girls’ school, Prior’s Field, near Godalming. It opened in January 1902. ‘It’s what I’ve always wanted to do,’ she said. Here, too, was the influence of Mrs Humphry Ward, who had already established schools for ‘cripples’, and the ‘playcentre’ care system for children ...”

“... his description of Wheatfield with Crows has never been bettered.)Wheatfield with Crows, Cane Field with Revolutionary … Suburb in Havana is a title, not a painting. Sometimes titles matter, sometimes not. In the end, an accounting of Suburb in Havana has to take on the question of its ‘Cuban-ness’, its Fidelismo. It has to reckon with the ...”

“... used lethal injections, a technique perfected on Muselmänner. Dachau just shot them in a field – more than four thousand POWs died this way between September 1941 and June 1942. In the east a new and more promising technique was in development: the purpose-built gas chamber. On 5 September 1941 hundreds of Soviet POWs were forced into a cellar at ...”

“... the decades proceed, the possibilities shift. When a male graduate student joins the programme – Frank S. Hogg is his Mad Magazine name – he ends up with the new Pickering Fellow from Mount Holyoke, Miss Sawyer. They both keep working, and Sawyer goes on to win a prestigious prize. Later Bart Bok, just 22, turns up, and is starry-eyed for Miss ...”

“... used to it.) Yet H.D.’s names do not so much delimit poetic or novelistic action as indicate a field of resonance. Hermione is both the name of Helen’s daughter in Greek mythology and the wronged mother/wife in The Winter’s Tale. H.D. was a writer, after all, whose mother was named Helen and who had a profound visionary experience of ...”

“... and the argument over how to define and apply Constitutional freedoms begins to turn ugly. Judge Frank M. Johnson Jr, the great liberal Southern jurist on the 11th US Circuit Court of Appeals, who former Alabama Governor George Wallace called an ‘integrating, carpet-bagging, scalawagging, bald-faced liar’, explained the flammable Constitutional argument ...”

“... work to be done, so, once he’s better, our Signor Tenente goes with others to clear the field hospitals in the mountains and take down the wounded. He visits Gorizia again, where, before long, he is holed up in a villa eating spaghetti and drinking ‘two bottles of wine that had been left in the cellar of the villa’. I wondered at the mention of ...”

“... held a small number of books: The Highland Clearances by John Prebble, pamphlets on local flora, a field guide to birds, Gavin Maxwell’s Ring of Bright Water. After we’d unpacked, we went for a stroll over the salt marsh. The tide was out, leaving creeks and channels. A bridge spanned the river that ran, swollen with snow melt, down to the sea. It seemed ...”

“... of civic discourse, posters appeared out of nowhere with the head of a man who wasn’t quite Frank Dobson. There was nothing peevish or pop-eyed about this citizen. The shirt was open-necked. The tilted look was watchful, eyes narrowed against bright light: a non-combatant shocked to find himself exposed on the hustings. No Londoner, according to the ...”

“... of lost grandeur. ‘Looking at you now is like/seeing a god or a king/naked and starving in a field,’ the poet Rebecca Morgan Frank wrote in ‘Monk Automaton, c.1560’ (2021), an ode to the machine. But clothed and activated the monk becomes uncanny, even whimsical. When placed on a table it traces the path of a ...”

“... whole European tradition. It suits me fine if that’s all down the drain.’ This happens to be Frank Judd speaking in the late 1960s, but all that distinguishes it from Futurist manifestos of fifty years before is its tone of lumpen disgruntlement. Allen Ginsberg, quoted in one of Butler’s epigraphs, says: ‘there is nothing to be learned from history ...”

“... It was the brainchild of Léopold Senghor, Senegal’s president, who saw the arts as a field of struggle. Two subsequent festivals took place, in Algiers in 1969 and Lagos in 1977, and their history bears out Senghor’s claim in a way he did not intend: they have faded into obscurity.While studying and teaching in Paris in the 1930s, Senghor and a ...”

“... mullein, partridge pea, beggar’s lice, sandspur, wild garlic, wild mustard, wild geranium, old-field cinquefoil, cinnamon fern and lady fern. Mitchell might have written that the cemetery was overgrown with weeds and left it at that, but he didn’t. It was in this wilderness of weeds and wildflowers that Mr George H. Hunter, whose mother had been born a ...”

“... on 23 January looks suspiciously neat.’ Portray me, Canning may have been saying, and I who can frank your heavy-duty packages will arrange for your bail and have the charge lifted. If that was the bargain, Gillray repaid the debt with characteristic wit and economy. He made Canning wait nine months before casting him in Promis’d Horrors of the French ...”