“... timetables. His pursuit of girls culminated in his courtship of Penelope Chetwode, daughter of a Field Marshal, and his marriage to her forms the final chapter and grand climax of this volume. It does make an interesting story. They were an oddly assorted couple, yet truly compatible. She was a learned archaeologist, but also enormously patrician. Her ...”

“... subtlest and most entrancing of Bridget Riley’s early paintings, Static 2 (1966), consists of a field of black spots arranged in a pure grid, 25 by 25, across a white square. Static, as the title says, and yet the painting isn’t inert: a lovely sense of inner movement is conveyed by the way the spots, which are not pure circles but mildly oval, are ...”

“... long spell in a mental hospital, given shelter and support by a white-goateed older writer called Frank Sargeson, played by Martyn Sanderson. She lives and types in his garden shed, finishes a novel, and sends it off to a publisher he has recommended. The novel is accepted and Sargeson waves at the garden gate as Frame leaves for Europe on a literary ...”

“... context for Fontarabbia; but it is a context which (like all scholarly contexts) defines the field of Milton’s poem as shadow does light. That field can only be crossed by going to Fontarrabia through Milton’s own directions. The meaning of the name is not in history or geography or other nations’ myths or other ...”

“... Sobers, who? Some Australians who grew up when I did argue with some force for Keith Miller. As Frank Keating’s book proves, however, Miller can quickly be rejected for second place. It goes, unquestionably, to Ian Botham. Indeed in one crucial respect, Botham beats even the great Sobers himself. Only 22 times in over a thousand Test matches has a player ...”

“... machine. Apparently there was now some crippled young man at King’s who was working on a unified field theory that would explain absolutely everything. Surrounded by these exemplars of mental effort, I couldn’t even be sure that I would do the work I had cut out for myself. The only truly baffling moments in James are these, when you don’t know how the ...”

“... with the uncommunicable. A chanter of enchantment, underneath The honoured inventor of a unified Field theory or detector of gravitons Or prince’s perfectly proportioned bride. In another poem he put the antithesis clearly as between ‘the neat completed work’ and what it might be better to leave to posterity: The words on book marks, enigmatic ...”

“... Storm (1940) both contain defences of his practice. ‘There is no longer a reasonably small field which may be taken as general knowledge. It is impertinent to suggest that the reader ought to possess already any odd piece of information one may have picked up in a field where one is oneself ignorant; and it does not ...”

“... green-bottled gin, would be captioned something like ‘frogs leaping on a baize table on a grassy field’. These ads might have been produced by Alphonse Allais, the humorist of the late 19th-century burlesque salons of the Incohérents in Paris. Allais was, among other things, an early Gary Larson, a cartoonist of the elongated art title. He’d elaborate ...”

“... debate about the purpose of literary criticism and its relation to ‘theory’. Addressing Frank Kermode has its origin in a conference devoted to Kermode’s work. Five papers selected from those delivered at the conference are followed by a reply from Kermode himself; five more follow which ‘acknowledge, more or less directly’, his ...”

“... blurb, ‘the opposition between high and popular culture became untenable, transforming the field of enquiry from literary into cultural studies’ – incidentally, a fair sample of new-era, defiantly messy prose. For, as everybody likes to say, there has been a Kuhnian paradigm-shift, and to be installed on the far side of it is to feel comfortable ...”

“... every citizen should have 14 cubic metres of fresh air. As in so much else, the English led the field in the provision of taps and water closets. Baths and bidets slowly caught on. Meanwhile the pleasures of olfaction reached the heights of super-refinement we associate with Huysmans. Yet the crowd remained obstinately ‘loyal to filth’. Corbin enjoys ...”

“... resist as well as to comply with the external forces under which it is produced. Successors in the field of cultural history will want to show that in spite of, or even in consequence of, this apparent contradiction, artists of unfettered imagination, who assimilate the enemies bequeathed them, do hang together with everything else that was going on at the ...”

“... wander about the world without being anywhere at all, America was his objective, his ‘untilled field’. ‘Remember,’ he lectures Mountsier, who was American anyway, ‘one should move westwards, never eastwards. Eastwards is retrogression. We move west and southwards – that is the living direction.’ His later career was to prove that you could get ...”

“... hope he wiped his feet!’ she cried) and persuaded us to drop any novel that contained it. The field thus thinned, we proceeded to the terminal tussle, and achieved a unanimous verdict for P.H. Newby’s Something to Answer for. I continue to think this an excellent novel, though hardly anybody seems to have heard of it, let alone read it. It ...”