“... intimately and earnestly, their heavy shoulders tensed over their drinks. Naturally I edged up close to Chiv and Big Mal, hoping to hear – what? Fluent, allusive talk of set-pieces, short corners, long throw-ins, one-against-one situations, professional fouls, banana kicks. What I heard went something like this. ‘The more you learn, the more you ...”

“... Fella, there is a group photograph of the entire Modern Movement in architecture (the lot, bar Frank Lloyd Wright and Mies van der Rohe), and there’s Jim, modestly in the back row but practically in the middle. The progress (or retreat) of the Modern Movement in architecture from its Thirties role as a revolutionary cadre of the Popular Front to its ...”

“... she forced her patients to swallow the skin on their hot milk. To distant friends, for she had no close ones, she wrote vigorous letters, and especially to Oswald Faringdon, widowed father of two small boys, far off in Egypt. ‘I wonder how you would care for life out here?’ he wrote, intending speculation but absent-mindedly posing a question ...”

“... Guggenheim as the flagship of a resuscitated Bilbao that it spent £96 million of public funds on Frank Gehry’s building, use of the Guggenheim name, access to the Guggenheim collection and a few Guggenheim pieces with which to start its own. The Basque Autonomous Government, helped by a trust fund of private companies, will also foot the bill for the ...”

“... it is just finished. It has been too long in the making to have the freshness of something like Frank Gehry’s Bilbao Guggenheim. It would be absurd to make this a reason for underestimating its old-fashioned virtues: there are things which were done better then. And political questions remain to which no clear answer can be expected: will it be finished ...”

“... where you are, but you’re not here.’He isn’t the only character in Homesickness who seems close to a breakdown. ‘Being depressed is like being in a dream,’ says another, shortly after he’s discharged from hospital. ‘The suspicion is that everyone you meet is actually depressed too.’ In the world of these stories, it’s a suspicion that ...”

“... a national embarrassment. Some demanded the end of Documenta altogether. The German president, Frank-Walter Steinmeier, responded by warning ‘there are limits’ to artistic freedom when it comes to political issues. Chancellor Scholz announced that for the first time in thirty years he wouldn’t be going to the show. The culture minister, Claudia ...”

“... and which they wisely do not seek to share.’ The nearest reflection is two days distant. ‘We close an eye and see no more than the side of the nose, or possibly some facial hair, the outer regions of a beard. We know our hands and knees but not our eyes and teeth.’ The past is imagined here in all its richness, or paucity, though neither alternative ...”

“... it laborious compared to texting and messaging. ‘If it’s a professor you don’t have a close relationship with, you have to say, hi professor whatever, I’m in your class or I’m interested in this blah blah blah,’ one student says. ‘You have to kind of frame it.’ Several of the students surveyed watch recorded lectures at triple speed ...”

“... the rasping crackle of a base-set, came and went in the room. Our meeting was short and not very frank. We sat with three men in uniform. I’d come to Kosovo, I said, to trace the family of some refugees and knew that here only a small number of the people displaced during the Serbian offensive – 250,000 according to the UN, nearly double that by the ...”

“... revised and sent off to Poetry Chicago today. I believe it is the best thing I’ve done.’ As we close in on the centenary of Basil Bunting’s birth at Scotswood-on-Tyne in 1900 it looks more and more as if this long poem written late in his life is not simply the best thing that Bunting had done but among the very best poems anyone has done this ...”

“... Highgate Express, the Evening Standard and a publication called New Moon. Instead of large reviews close to the publication date, there has only been this desultory attention which includes a notably foolish review by Gabriel Josipovici in which he states that he would happily trade ‘the whole of that impeccable philo-semite, Joyce (the darling of the ...”

“... stencilled with the names of those colours but in ways that rarely match up. Such developments close out the first decade of his work, one of the most consequential in the career of any 20th-century artist.As important as the use of the commonplace is the attitude of sufferance: Johns suggested a shift in artistic voice from the active to the passive, from ...”

“... at Harvard, then teaching fiction at Emerson College in Boston; Syracuse, where he went to be close to the poet Mary Karr; Bloomington-Normal for his first secure position at Illinois State; and finally Pomona College, in Claremont, California, where he killed himself in 2008 at the age of 46. He emerged as a writer from a university-based avant-garde ...”

“... arrivals in Bloomsbury from the outside. ‘Most people were at that time ordinary,’ said Frank Swinnerton, looking back with nostalgia to the beginning of the century, and Dora Carrington might have had the good luck to stay ordinary. David Garnett, introducing his selection of letters, felt that the reader might ask: ‘Who was this woman ...”