“... of two men who showed that heavy management of this sort is not always the best way. One, Frank Blackmore, invented the mini-roundabout: During the 1950s and 1960s traffic growth exposed the weaknesses of earlier roundabout designs, which operated without any priority rule. The result was increasing intrusion, land-take and cost. He successfully ...”

“... of refugees from Germany that did much to transform intellectual life in New Zealand. Her husband, Peter, worked as a statistician in the Education Department. There were also the Dronkes, the Steiners, the people who founded the chamber music society. There was Karl Popper. Mostly they were reduced to doing jobs nothing like as responsible as those they had ...”

“... the great canvas of the Cold War were already under way in the Balkans in the summer of 1944 when Frank Thompson was executed. Bulgaria was a member of the Axis and Frank, older brother of the historian E.P. Thompson, was on a mission in the country for Special Operations Executive: the idea was that anti-Nazi partisans ...”

“... the rejection of Modernism, ‘the impoverishment of national culture’, as the admired Peter Ackroyd calls it, dominate the final section. But the period has its heroes, and Appleyard’s choices of hero seem to coincide with those of Ackroyd: they are J.H. Prynne, ‘the most comprehensively gifted of living British poets’, and, on loan from New ...”

“... 90 times, against Mark’s nine, and examines at length the verbs describing the discovery by Peter and John of the empty grave. John saw the grave-clothes and believed; Peter saw them and didn’t believe. What they believed or didn’t was in any case wrong, because they got from Mary Magdalene the false report that ...”

“... malice. Vincent Price was too camp to be really alarming, even as the witchfinder general. Peter Lorre was heartbreaking as a child murderer. James Gandolfini, playing an incorrigibly mean-minded godfather for seven years, strangely held on to the affection of most of his mass audience. James Cagney had his moments of deadpan nastiness, but there’s ...”

“... girls seem a different species. The production which the events of the story bring to an end is of Peter Pan. In it Stella controls Tinkerbell’s torch and O’Hara plays Captain Hook – and Mr Darling, ‘as is traditional’. ‘There are numerous books on the meaning behind this particular play,’ Meredith says at the first rehearsal. I am not qualified ...”

“... theatrical gesture is violent, it is disinterested.’ Well, we had our theatre of violence, from Peter Brook’s Titus Andronicus to his Marat/Sade and great King Lear. There was undoubtedly a nouveau frisson, but those who experienced it, at Stratford or the Aldwych, were hardly to be thought of as good subjects for the kinds of trance and catharsis Artaud ...”

“... Ihadn’t​ been expecting to bump into Frank in one of the remoter stacks of the Cambridge University Library. This is where they keep the back numbers of old scholarly periodicals, a morgue only likely to be violated by those, like me, who now spend their days picking over the cairns left by academic labourers seventy years ago ...”

“... and vistas. New, glass-fronted buildings that hide nothing don’t play that game. Yet even the frank display they seem to offer is a tease. Checkpoints and turnstiles lie beyond the welcomingly sliding glass. Things look more open, but high up cameras are tracking ...”

“... are built for notable collections. Storrie’s commentary on the work of Daniel Liebeskind and Frank Gehry shows how their most acclaimed buildings – Liebeskind’s Jewish Museum in Berlin and Gehry’s Bilbao Guggenheim – achieved presence not by complementing collections but by taking over from them the job of engaging attention. The contrast between ...”

“... one to guess at more than the picture shows. Although you can’t generalise – Leon Kossoff and Frank Auerbach make pictures of ordinary North London without seeming to imply stories about the scenes they record – there is an English tendency to find the first impetus to picture-making in personalities and narrative, rather than in formal values of ...”

“... from clearly delimited material. Her concentration on a chosen bit of coast brings her closer to Frank Auerbach, who has concentrated on Primrose Hill, than to painters who made brush marks more like her own. When you think about what kind of artist she was, putting her child-invaded studio and Lucian Freud’s naked-friend-and-acquaintance-laden chairs and ...”

“... Peter Lessing​ died in his flat, of a heart attack, in the early hours of 13 October 2013, aged 66. His mother, Doris Lessing, died four weeks later, on 17 November 2013, aged 94, in the adjoining house. An interconnecting door had been cut into the shared wall and was always left open. This very nearly tells the story of their lives as mother and son, in the sense that we know our planet is part of our universe, but there remain gaping holes of incomprehension that no one is going to be able to fill no matter how much detail their story is told in ...”

“... Council. Behind established international figures such as Patrick White, Thomas Keneally and now Peter Carey crowds a small army – a second wave, as it were – of grant-garlanded and prize-bedecked novelists and storytellers, many of whom, especially those whose reputations derive initially from short fiction, have benefited from the Board’s ...”