“... posthumously in 1976. It is Ransome who leads off Caute’s parade of useful idiots on the first page of his first chapter. Chambers tells essentially the same story as Brogan, though his emphasis is different. The bulk of his pages concentrate on Ransome’s adventures in Russia and the Baltic, with his career as a children’s writer tacked on, rather ...”

“... to the inflexible British rule of the time, was in my newly acquired married name: Mrs Sheila Bruce. I mentally repudiated this British ‘Mrs Bruce’ as a meaningless bureaucratic construct without a history or a place in the world. (Was she English? Scottish? Northern Irish? Did she take on Alex’s working-class ...”

“... have been added. But this does not (apparently) preclude the necessity to rehearse in glossy, full-page technicolour the whole career, from its beginnings in the early Seventies – Horn’s performances with bodily prostheses strapped to her own or her performers’ heads, arms, fingers, breasts – through the feature-length films of the late Seventies and ...”

“... is how you find them among the Rothkos – another magnet for contemplatives.Around the corner are Bruce Nauman’s assembled screens – a pair with talking heads, another with jumping clowns, a whole group with actors playing and replaying a domestic argument – and Paul McCarthy’s Rocky, in which, gloved up, the artist hits himself. In Shaman-Girl’s ...”

“... and tastes. In her straining after the essence of things, she reminds one of David Malouf and of Bruce Chatwin (who married into her clan). I don’t mean that she copies them: she is too committed, too intense for that; an element of what an American reviewer called ‘self-administered therapy’ convinces one that she is too seriously involved to be ...”

“... and doubtless for his own good reasons Mr Ponting felt that he should steer clear of me. As Bruce Laughland, his counsel, and Jonathan Caplan, the deputy counsel, were to reiterate in court, they were counsel for Mr Ponting and not Mr Dalyell. There were differences. For example, before the trial Mr Ponting said he did not share my contention that the ...”

“... the charming detail from Giacomo Jaquerio’s painting that adorns the jacket of Jay Olshansky and Bruce Carnes’s book suggests that this is the convention.) Immortality is not synonymous with eternal youth, however, and Olshansky and Carnes remind us of one of the less well-known stories in Gulliver’s Travels. It involves a tiny minority in the country of ...”

“... down to the deepest terrors and desires. Jonson’s most certainly have not.’ Insofar as Bruce Thomas Boehrer’s resourceful sifting of Jonson’s plays focuses on the network of tentacular roots animating their language, it might be seen as a salutary transatlantic redressing of an earlier American deformation. His concern to explore the furthest ...”

“... poets: Charles Bernstein, Lyn Hejinian, Rae Armantrout, Steve McCaffery, Ron Silliman, Susan Howe, Bruce Andrews and perhaps a dozen others, who first published during the 1970s in a brace of little magazines, one of which bore the all too catchy name L=A=N=G=U=A=G=E. Often – too often – seen as a uniform group, language writers soon became the subject of ...”

“... military presence in Britain, but who may have neither the time nor the inclination to read a 340-page book. ‘Go to the Oriel Room in the Commons Library, and having got the Unsinkable Aircraft-Carrier, turn to pages 76 and 77. There you will find a map of all the American bases and installations in Britain. You and I are meant to be public representatives ...”

“... Caesar wrote in his autobiography Caesar’s Hours (2003). ‘We wrote together note by note, page by page … I would try it on for them. I had to feel good about each sketch because I was the one who had to perform it.’ This bespoke material worked well for Caesar, but not always for his bumptious ...”

“... of this book,* bursting through the plane of white paper as if in symbolic disdain for the printed page on which his fame has never relied. The full career of Jim Henson reveals that the gulf between the traditions of fairy tale and the self-inventing styles of television culture generally thought to have supplanted them is not as wide as the disparity between ...”

“... steps a day. I know this with such precision not because I’ve turned into a cross between Bruce Chatwin and Rain Man but because I’ve been using a Fitbit One, a fancy-schmancy pedometer which tracks how much I’ve been moving about and automatically synchronises it, via a Bluetooth dongle on my computer, with a website and an app on my phone. The ...”

“... It has been calculated that 20 per cent of the contributors to the TLS under the editorship of Bruce Richmond (1903-37) were members of the Athenaeum. Most articles were of course unsigned until 1974, and at least in those early years the paper’s fabled anonymity was really the signature of the institutional, the establishment’s individual voice. It ...”

“... of close attention as Hinde at his best. Hinde’s own attention wavers in Daymare. The second page shows his prose as equable as ever but less alert: ‘The old village stood – still stands – around the Common, a long oval of chalky turf now useful only to Miss Winifred Mannerly’s three white-bearded goats, mown fortnightly ...’ Goat-mowing, a ...”