“... work in archives and libraries, was salutary. When working on Verandah he reported to his brother John that ‘the time is, as for Queen Mary, eaten up by the research, by the absolute necessity of reading every line of every document so as to absorb; the absorption goes on day and night, sleeping, waking, eating or talking; and I cannot at my time of life ...”

“... Howard tackles the throes of childbirth and Laura Footes those of Crohn’s disease. A house by John Davies bursts with eerie, ghostly flames. The gallery door closes and the dark world outside looks darker. Ray Ward made me laugh, however. His ink drawings, bending round pasted-together eggboxes and plastic cartons to conjure up little merry-go-rounds of ...”

“... is that there is still an intense desire to make art out of the urban condition. The politics of John Heartfield’s collages and the work of the Russians in the 1920s have not lost their verve and bite. But commercial imagery – still, moving, computer-made, photographed, even hand-drawn – has occupied so much of the visual universe that finding a margin ...”

“... About Modern Art, Sylvester tells how Britain in the 1950s had, as he saw it, to be saved from John Berger (both men had stints as art critic for the New Statesman) whose ‘rhetorical skills and . . . performing skills on TV won considerable support, financial as well as moral, for inferior artists.’Berger had a Ruskinian interest in the social context ...”

“... for John Minihan Nous nous aimerons tous et nos enfants riront De la légende noire où pleure un solitaire. Paul Eluard The sort of snailmail that can take a week but suits my method, pre-informatique, I write this from the St Louis, rm 14 – or type it, rather, on the old machine, a portable, that I take when I migrate in ‘the run-up to Christmas ...”

“... the London pictures, paintings from 1618 through to the late 1620s, include religious subjects (St John on Patmos, The Immaculate Conception) and genre pieces (The Water-Seller of Seville, Kitchen Scene with Christ in the House of Martha and Mary). The genre pictures are lit, it seems, by an afternoon sunlight which penetrates dark rooms, strikes highlights ...”

“... An early one, the National Gallery Baptism of Christ, is dominated by just such naked figures – John and Christ. They are not shown, however, in a corner of classical Tuscany but set against a scene of North European forest and mountains – a landscape like a stage backdrop. The backdrop shares none of the light which descends through a ring of dancing ...”

“... again.’ ‘Always’ seems a bit of a stretch, but the idea is interesting. Petzold thinks of John Wayne in The Searchers – ‘also a ghost’, he says – and we could add James Stewart in Vertigo struggling to bring back to life a woman who isn’t dead. And closer to home, or to Germany, we could think of Petzold’s film Phoenix (2014), where a ...”

“... has gone horribly wrong, and the solace the authors find in the architecture of Caruso St John or Eric Parry does not make up for it. No guide to London’s architecture has ever been so successful. Regularly updated from top to bottom every decade or so since its first publication in 1983 it obviously fulfils a need. There is no shortage of guides to ...”

“... seen at first sight’ was another of his aphorisms, one that he borrowed from Gotthold Lessing or John Opie, magpie that he was. ‘Every glance is a glance for study,’ he also said. The scene in Rain, Steam and Speed is of an imminent death, the instant of an action caught by a glance. A train rushes across a bridge and is bearing down on a hare that’s ...”

“... advocacy organisation. In 1965 she helped open the world’s first school for autistic children (John Lennon was a major donor). She wrote the first, and still definitive, guide for parents of autistic children. But she is best remembered for the term she coined in 1981, in the journal Psychological Science: Asperger’s syndrome. As she acknowledged much ...”

“... This​ book is a departure from John Carey’s normal mode, much more intently introductory than anything else he has written in a long and distinguished career. A Little History of Poetry canters from Gilgamesh and Homer to Mary Oliver and Les Murray in three hundred pages with a breezy sense of mission, assuming in the reader no previous acquaintance with the subject (‘Confessional poetry is poetry that reveals personal confidences, especially relating to mental illness and hospitalisation’) or indeed with other sorts of knowledge that might be thought fairly general (‘Totalitarian regimes seek to control every aspect of life, including writing ...”

“... sea.’ The weird uplift the rhyme gives to ‘we’ lends the doldrums a flicker of impudence. John Bayley heard in these lines Auden’s enjoyment ‘of the possibilities of making the situation stylish … the esplanade, and the hilarious precision of sopping and dingy, only give the reader that retrospective warmth which comes from remembering the ...”

“... flowers to the wire fencing around the Rose and the Globe, had a familiar whiff.Andrew Gurr and John Orrell’s Rebuilding Shakespeare’s Globe concerns a project conceived well before the recent discoveries. But its primary aim – to present the case for a ‘reconstruction’ of the Globe Theatre in Southwark near the site of the original – might well ...”

“... the bewildering complexity of the Iran-Contra affair, and got gates galore. Since Oliver North and John Poindexter had communicated their fell designs through a system called the Prof computer, and since the thing hinged so much on transfers of hot and dirty money, I myself proudly came up with ‘Profligate’ which, though it won me no prizes, did get ...”