“... 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 ...”

“... of America’s relatively insignificant (and in any case divided) ‘Jewish lobby’. Mann’s frank admission that he cannot explain Israeli-American relations should encourage readers to ponder some of the less-than-rational forces that may underlie US devotion to, even obsession with, Israel. What we can say with some confidence is that this unusual ...”

“... In December​ 1963, the literary critic, essayist and lyrical memoirist Alfred Kazin filed a field report from an after party for a Commentary magazine symposium ‘on the Negro’. (Symposia on the Negro were popular in the 1960s, helping to keep white liberal panellists occupied and furrowed until the ferocious later phase of Black Power made them all squirm ...”

“... on the north side, some for a family called Secker who seem to live in the manor house across the field, a romantic rambling house that looks unrestored and has oddly in its grounds an ornate seaside-looking Edwardian clock tower.The Windrush tumbles through the weir on this mild winter morning, but the idyll is deceptive as once, at least, the river has seen ...”

“... as though writing were a question of pressing forward over one brow after another in the rolling field of the imagination – make him just as much a Modern as Baudelaire. And more fashionably, they deny the poet any tenure at the centre of the poem. Mark Treharne’s superb English versions of the Illuminations catch these shifts and transections ...”

“... Gestapo. Paulette, pretending to be Arab, pointed to a photograph of Goering: ‘Look, your own field marshal looks more Jewish than I do!’ They were released. Later, on what he remembers with shame as the Day of the Boot, he and his mother were in a shoeshop when he became terrified that her nose might tip off the Gestapo. He ran out, ready to leave his ...”