“... city. The London plane tree by my window hangs its green leatherette sleeves, exhausted by a hard May. My varsity jacket. The sky between leaves is the brightest thing in nature, Virginia Woolf told the inquiring Rupert Brooke. Whatever. Laisser-faire I can really only feign disapproval of my youngest dibbling his semolina’d fingers in the satiny lining of ...”

“... Love works in a mysterious way, as you would say. ‘Anyway,’ she ends, ‘it’s a fine auto. May look a wreck but it sure goes. It’ll get you all the way back to lil ol ...”

“... nudity draws out the peeping fruit of the lemon tree. Perhaps its light cologne is so wooing, she may deliquesce before flames take her.                                      Item 3: La Surprise. A Watteau recovered after two hundred years is possibly retardant. Tuning his guitar, the musician observes two lovers; they are ...”

“... With yellow nettle-pollen and the first               thorn’s confetti Crushed the May bridegroom’s Head into her flood. She bore him fresh splendour Of eel-wreaths and a glut of white peal. Where is she now? A fairy Drowned in the radio-active Irish Sea. Blood-donor To the South-West Water Authority. Her womb’s been requisitioned. Now ...”

“... that gave the room they sat in a lived-in feeling. She is so sorry for her own appearance, for it may seem as if she has been crying, or that she is about to, or that she is slightly off balance – not entirely upright – hair uncombed. The man wept when he at last left for good, as predicted, but we can see soon enough from the man’s expression, he is no ...”

“... Dressing up in secret clothes at home – batiks and silks, caftans, sarongs – is all that you may need. If not, cuisine comes next: Asian takeaway in confidential brown paper bags. Only when ready come out in public: sitting at roadside stalls proudly becoming what you eat, stir-fry and rice, and more rice, in small civilised portions. Now you must use ...”

“... his factory has poisoned everything are as beautiful as Brueghel. I keep my shop, in order that I may sell everything there, empty but I leave the light on. Everything might spill. Do you know that in the deepest part of the sea everything goes transparent? asks my husband’s friend Corrado and I say Do you know how afraid I am? Everything requires ...”

“... to be laid in a box of his own device. To this day, if you happen to pass that shadowy glade you may see a ghostly rider riding a ghostly mare. You lit a cigarette. And as for the princess? I said. She married an English prince and got beheaded, you ...”

“... pinkThen indigo, the way there are still starsBeyond the light pollutionAnd satellites. Bad men may go to MarsAnd leave us, evil suffer a diminution.For better or worse, we vowed.But what gets better?The zithering cicadas think out loudThat August is getting hotter. (Not cooler and wetter.)The swallows, having raised this summer’s brood,Set out for ...”

“... protests like those that make up much of Radical Light tend to fall out of the frame? One answer may be that rhetorical subjects have short lifespans. No one likes the sense of being told what to feel. Longoni’s Alone! shows a young woman, her face buried in her arms beside a lily-covered coffin. Longoni has made grief weakly pretty. Morbelli’s old ...”

“... given what most of us talk about most of the time what we actually say when we’re on the phone may be the least interesting thing about the call. Certainly this is the view of the growing Intelligence Support Systems industry (ISS), which sells analysis tools to government agencies, police forces and – increasingly – the phone companies ...”

“... the saint about her. The variations put you in the presence of a crowd – that of the makers. It may be that Henner’s image was chosen as a source because the face fitted some common notion of beauty. It may also have been chosen because it offered those who acquired the images comfort in tribulation ...”

“... must read it too. Paintings and illustrated books usually have an optimum viewing distance; you may peer at details but most of the time you choose a position that takes in the whole. With maps it is different. Walking round the British Library galleries you are forever moving in and out, scanning the whole and reading the detail. When you are reading the ...”

“... A ping-pong table in the Ron Arad: Restless exhibition (at the Barbican until 16 May) shows that you don’t need to change the rules just because you’ve changed the equipment. The stainless steel playing surface curves gently down from each end to meet at the steel net. Sneaky top-spin drives would, I guess, bounce high, but I didn’t experiment (bats and balls can be borrowed ...”

“... where it came from and then try to adumbrate Khamenei’s statement. It’s important because it may be the key to the outcome of the present nuclear negotiations with Iran. Let WSWU be the number of SWUs needed to separate a feed with a percentage of uranium-235 xf – the rest being uranium-238 – into a product with a U-235 percentage xp and a remainder ...”