“... Are weextinct yet. Who ownsthe map. May Ilook. Where is myclaim. Is my historyverifiable. Have Iincluded the memoryof the animals. The animals’memories. Are theystill here. Are wealone. Lookthe filamentsappear. Of memories. Whose? What waslandlike. Did it movethrough us. Something says nonstopare you hereare your ancestorsreal do you have abody do you haveyr self inmind can you see yrhands – have you broken itthe thread – try to feel thepull of the otherend – make sureboth ends arealive when u pull totry to re-enterhere ...”

“... the sky was like cardboard, the same depthless no-colour as the pavements and buildings. It was May, and pink cherry blossoms lay and shoaled in the gutter, bleeding as after some wedding ... Broken glass, corrugated tin and spraygunned plywood saying Arsenal rules the world. Twenty floors up Chantry Point, the grey diamond panels over two arsoned windows ...”

“... you say. And I miss you. No Master is majestic except to devotees of English Verse, his virtues may not be at all domestic. Housewifely traits don’t make me love you worse. All couples living irritate each other. I have my nuisance value – like a cat. But still it’s value – Irritation’s brother can still be Love, you see. Just think of ...”

“... or mushrooms) which either contributed to or was projected onto the whole complex. However that may be, the myths which flowed into the Sabbath all converged on the notion of a journey to the beyond and back again, of a crossing over to the world of the dead and returning from it. Ginzburg ends by arguing that the permanence of this theme, through ...”

“... what’s the profit? Only that, in time We half-identify the blind impress All our behavings bear, may trace it home. But to confess, On that green evening when our death begins, Just what it was, is hardly satisfying, Since it applied only to one man once, And that one dying. This poem is about the fear of dying, of extinction, to which Larkin confessed in ...”

“... sense, but something of a culture-hero for both his time and our own. In this portrait there may be noted a stress which illuminates the observation that ‘poetry for [Pope], as for his great predecessors, is emphatically more a social than a personal institution’ – a debatable point when made concerning Pope, but perhaps relevant to the book’s ...”

“... into the clayThrough seven heroic centuries;Cast your mind on other daysThat we in coming days may beStill the indomitable Irishry.Yeats died on 28 January 1939. Two days earlier, W.H. Auden and Christopher Isherwood had arrived in New York. When Auden heard of Yeats’s death, he sought to ascertain what time of the day or night he had died. He was ...”

“... Interior, in which there is a figure – a maid – but she has her back to you. Why so few? It may just be that painters didn’t feel a picture without a figure was complete, but whatever the reason, the unpeopled room is a late subject. Unpeopled landscapes are rare too, but the tradition of outdoor sketching, as much note-taking as picture-making, goes ...”

“... assumption that adaptation is an ongoing success story. Human beings, it seems, are all right. We may shoot ourselves in the foot, other people in the head, crash cars and planes, ruin the environment and have a bad habit of turning conflicts of interest into vast cash bonuses, but natural selection works, or at least works better than reason and technology ...”

“... kind of bird or fish or limpets’, or maybe fillet of walrus, though the seafood angle may be deceptive. Caliban’s promise to ‘get thee/ young seamews from the rock’ could equally well refer to a kill on the crags inland: i.e. chamois, via ‘scammel’, and thence to ‘seamew’. A high protein lunch in any event. Fitzpatrick, the editor of ...”

“... Each card is illuminated, if not exactly illustrated, by an installation, a display that may include garments, old and new, photographs, objects from the V&A and other collections, and things made for the exhibition: wax ‘casts’ of clothes, a grid of diamond-shaped cubby-holes that contain a glove and porcelain figurines of hunchbacks, a ...”

“... they upload, but there have been no significant cases so far of anyone trying to enforce it. That may be because so few users think they are doing anything original. There is instead a popular urge to present the common and the mundane as wonderful using the photographic quirks, accidents and faults of the past. The look of the analogue snapshot – a ...”

“... The debris can’t be reassembled after this. Eighty, ninety years from now, modules in history may well invoke Hollande’s failure to talk Brussels into a compromise on austerity in 2012. If they’re smart they’ll record his forced march to a supply-side recovery that failed because, unable to raise the deficit, he was obliged to lift money from the ...”

“... rather too bluntly – Villeneuve is stately where Lynch is awkward. In his defence, Lynch may have been trying to prove to Hollywood that he could be as crude as it needed him to be. After all, he had turned down a chance to direct the third Star Wars movie in order to have his own opportunity in space. We should also perhaps make an allowance for the ...”

“... returned to the country. Paul still talks regularly to Norman’s ghost, and has fits of rage that may or may not have originated in his wartime service. He patches up his lifelong quarrel with David, and then compulsively quarrels with him again. He would rather be his boss than his dad. And of course there are several ...”