“... In 1944 and 1945, John Brinckerhoff Jackson surveyed the French and German countryside for the advancing US army. At the military intelligence training centre in Maryland, Jackson had been taught to see the territory he surveyed as an empty stage on which certain choreographed actions were to be performed, and others improvised in the event that the enemy, or the land itself, threw up surprises ...”

“... On the Petaluma Road, in the former Gold Rush territory of Northern California, a man inherits a farm, marries a miner’s daughter called Lydia Mendez and adopts a four-year-old boy from a neighbouring farm, whose parents have been murdered by a farm hand. His wife dies giving birth to their daughter, Anna. He leaves the hospital with two girls: the second, Claire, is the daughter of another mother who has died in childbirth ...”

“... We learn a lot about ourselves at the moment when we lose our balance. In the canon of philosophical pratfalls, a tumble taken by Montaigne, and recounted in his essay ‘On Practice’, is among the most instructive. Out riding one day with his retinue, Montaigne was seated (as M.A. Screech’s translation has it) on ‘an undemanding but not very reliable horse ...”

“... The best-known photograph of Eileen Gray was taken in 1926 by Berenice Abbott, whose sitters had lately included Cocteau, Gide and Joyce. Gray was 48, but looks younger: her hair is cropped, and she seems to be wearing a tailored suit. It is hard to imagine anybody looking more sleekly tuned to the modern than Gray does here. The perfect profile, the flying-helmet of dark hair, the slightly downcast gaze: all this promises the combination of austerity and affect that one finds in her designs ...”

“... a way of life. Adopting for a moment the familiar, modern and derogatory meaning of the word, Brian Dillon consoles us that ‘hypochondriacs are almost always other people.’ The condition exists on a continuum, with fraud at one end, delusion in the middle and medical incompetence at the other end; he is a benefits cheat, you are a ...”

“... as with Aylan Kurdi – you can’t get away from the body. Ai’s Royal Academy exhibition, which Brian Dillon wrote about in the LRB of 8 October 2015, was – to me – a confusing combination of the documentary (records of the children killed by the 2008 Sichuan earthquake), and the bigging-up of this already big artist himself: this vast, shaggy man ...”

“... essays in the exhibition catalogue (Hayward, £22.99) are collections of a kind: Marina Warner and Brian Dillon, the show’s curator, have both written magpie pieces that list facts about collecting and find disparate ways of talking about the idea of curiosity. Part of the pleasure of the cabinet of curiosities is, of course, that ‘curiosity’ has ...”

“... feats of intellectual scampering; both give the sense of a live mind being decanted onto the page. Brian Dillon’s Essayism, both a book of essays and a meditation on the form, doesn’t include Davenport in his pantheon of practitioners, but Dillon’s responsiveness is wide, to Virginia Woolf, to William Gass, to ...”

“... hand, is very much a book with a deducible moral. It describes a few days in the life of Michael Dillon, a thirtyish former poet now managing a hotel in his native Belfast. Dillon is on the point of leaving his wife Moira (beautiful, bulimic, too tightly wrapped for her own good) for his girlfriend Andrea (early ...”

“... has often been said to be a tribute to Dylan Thomas, but it seems he first thought of it as ‘Dillon’, possibly after the hard-bitten Dodge City lawman Matt Dillon, hero of the TV Western Gunsmoke. He was twenty years old, skinny and scruffy in jeans and a ‘Huck Finn cap’. In an early article in the New York ...”