“... one summer, to exchange thoughts which, in each case, would probably have been too intimate or too frank, or simply too intelligent, to have been confided to anyone else in their separate circles of acquaintance. ‘As I can see from the space left on the paper that we still have a good way to go before we reach Nörreport,’ writes ...”

“... ironic, single-breath, present tense, synthesised diary-takes by one of the great Americans; Frank O’Hara on his lunch hour from the Museum of Modern Art; Douglas Woolf driving somewhere, between jobs; Fielding Dawson. Drummond speaks of the pieces that make up 45 as ‘stories’. Some of them are very short, a set of acknowledgments dropped into the ...”

“... lived in Oxford) moaned: ‘His present power over literature, in fact over everything in every field, is at times almost disastrous, I do not know how he contrives to hold everybody in such constant awe and fear of his casual judgment.’ Her view is supported by Berlin’s own papers at the Bodleian, which show him to have been energetically meddlesome in ...”

“... a Christian after all) but that of the rest of the cast. 7 April. The open mouth of Chelsea’s Frank Lampard, having scored a goal, is also the howl on the face of the damned man in Michelangelo’s Last Judgment. 16 April. The row over Lord Ashcroft’s non-dom status seems to have died down. Nobody, I think, noted that it was the reverse of the row that ...”

“... the thorough and primitive duality of man; I saw that, of the two natures that contended in the field of my consciousness, even if I could rightly be said to be either, it was only because I was radically both.’ Thus as Wilde set to work on the creation of both himself and his character Dorian Gray, he was following an example which was embedded in the ...”

“... of the internal monologue in his head. ‘I find myself thinking of a guy standing in a field in the year 1200 doing whatever it is people in 1200 did while standing in fields,’ Saunders writes in ‘The Braindead Megaphone’. ‘I’m thinking about his mind, wondering what’s in it. What’s he talking about in that tape-loop in his ...”

“... infertility remains ‘unexplained’, which is a source of chagrin for the specialists in the field. The fertility gods, the doctors who make babies for thousands, swagger before the TV cameras, and preen like sheikhs. Since state aid for the infertile is patchy throughout Europe, with no uniform provision even within the UK, many individuals and couples ...”

“... families’ food consumption, child malnutrition and other indicators of distress has been a niche field staffed by specialists, who are skilled at reading the human tragedies in the numbers. And with painstaking caution a series of reports by international and US humanitarian analysts have explained that there is indeed starvation in Gaza, despite Israel’s ...”

“... after graduating in 1950, and worked as an agronomist for the colonial government. He made regular field trips not only to study Guinea’s social structure and soil – he conducted its first agricultural census – but to assess the readiness of the population for a war of liberation. Cabral’s anti-colonial activism angered the Portuguese secret police: he ...”

“... musicians, runaways, stuntmen, failed vaudevillians and stage actors, Hollywood was an open field on which to play. The film industry offered all comers a singular opportunity: the promise of a living and a new life. ‘I directed a picture when I was twenty,’ Lillian Gish said. ‘The opportunity was there for a woman if you wanted it.’ Edith Head ...”

“... its long aftermath. In response he passed not just a major cyclical stimulus, but also the Dodd-Frank Act, to regulate finance, and Obamacare, the single most significant domestic policy reform in decades. But Obama was enough of a man of the 1990s to believe that crisis was temporary and normality was just that, the norm. It would return.That assumption ...”

“... and nuclear safety, she became the first woman in the CDU ever to hold a ministry outside the field of women and family. During these years, Kohl routinely referred to her as ‘mein Mädchen’. It sounds belittling, and it was; in this case the condescension that still came naturally to male politicians of Kohl’s generation was affectionate. And ...”

“... and their multicoloured worlds of sauciness and sorcery – then switch to the stark monochrome field of Horses, and other images waiting in the wings: Richard Hell, Iggy Pop, the Ramones. It really was, as the old cliché has it, that black and white. There was no commando unit of primpy stylists for Smith in 1975 – just her, Mapplethorpe and (as related ...”

“... into the darkness, light as a commodity squandered as I had never known it before. 22 May. Reading Frank Kermode’s review of John Haffenden’s life of Empson makes me regret a little that Empson was cut out of The History Boys. In the first version of the play Hector sings the praises of Sheffield where he had been taught by Empson, then recounts to the ...”

“... I neither worshipped nor condemned. I admired him in parts, his skill, his knowledge in his own field, and for the rest I liked him and disliked him by turns. There were times, indeed, and these I fear were the most, when I disliked him very heartily. The speaker this evening was to be Dr Harry Benjamin, the famous Berlin endocrinologist, who had foreseen ...”