“... preoccupation with chance. Auster has always been interested in doom and bad luck, as in City of Glass, the first part of The New York Trilogy, with its 13 chapters and its deadly, engulfing coincidences. There the unhappy Quinn, accidentally a detective, has to decide which of two near-identical men to follow as they set off in opposite ...”

“... hair, dirty rags smelling of human excrement, and of course masses of paper, empty tins, broken glass and plastic’. For some reason, ‘the rubbish did not burn but the draught in the furnace sucked it up and spewed it out from the high chimney-stack, up towards the sky, and I watched with horror and amazement as all my refuse ... slowly descended to the ...”

“... by Chemical and Other Apparatus, Examining a Flask (1670s), one of the splendid plates in Philip Ball’s introduction to alchemy, depicts an alchemist at work, brandishing a beaker of pale blue fluid in one hand, surrounded by the implements of his craft. The room is unkempt: hundreds of glass and earthenware ...”

“... from races and the ‘score’ is kept in many sports – and of amorous communication on glass panes or tree bark. The word graffiti is related to the Italian sgraffito, a style of decoration in which fine lines are scratched through pigment to reveal burnished gilding beneath. The technique was employed in quattrocento panel paintings and in the ...”

“... Philip Larkin met Monica Jones in 1946 at Leicester University College. She was an assistant lecturer there, and Larkin was an assistant librarian. Both had firsts in English from Oxford. Monica Jones was an able lecturer, but she never published anything and so was never promoted, although she stayed at Leicester until she retired in 1981 ...”

“... private for his wife, ‘making his almost total blindness into a kind of gift for her, a perfect glass he had blown and polished’. Then his grandchildren, aided by his son, persuade him to perform in public for one more time, at the Fourth of July fair: in a gruesomely embarrassing scene, his tricks fail disastrously; he is too blind to notice, but the ...”

“... of 1914. Nicknamed the ‘Sainte Chapelle of reinforced concrete’, it is filled with stained glass by Maurice Denis and Marguerite Huré.So far, so progressive. But Perret was also an unabashed upholder of French classical architecture. In temperament he was a dapper, worldly and dignified figure, fond of apophthegms – the architectural counterpart ...”

“... flowers, and mounds of peaches, figs, nectarines and strawberries ripening in ‘steamy tents of glass’. Champagne bottles stood stacked on sideboards. Electric fans were positioned on huge blocks of ice, hidden by banks of hydrangeas. It’s hard to believe, but people were taking it in turns to recite Swinburne. ...”

“... iris-opening from black is repeated several times, on canvas, palette, paint tubes, smudged brandy-glass; and on the soundtrack come the ecstatic strains of Procul Harum’s ‘A Whiter Shade of Pale’. Scorsese’s hero, the successful but shabby and shambling New York painter Lionel Dobie, paints with ferocious energy, channels the music of the Sixties ...”

“... bedroom           By the light of the ev’ning star That shone through the plate glass window           From over Leamington Spa. The unexpectedness of plate glass in this context goes with the archaising laboriousness of the dropped trisyllable in ‘evening’. But neither is emphasised in a ...”

“... important pieces on the Monopoly board? Even his London Bridge Tower – if built, this 306-metre glass spire will be the tallest office building in Europe – looks like a World Trade Center scheme which, fed up with the debacle in Lower Manhattan, relocated from the Hudson to the Thames. Clearly, Renzo Piano Building Workshop delivers a design profile that ...”

“... Cardinal Richelieu’s sister did not dare sit down, because she believed she was made of glass. Facts such as this cry out for psychological explanation, and an attempt to provide it has been made by Elizabeth Wirth Marvick, in The Young Richelieu. The attempt is bravely made, and it rests on solid archival research in the Bibliothèque Nationale, the Archives, the British Library and other places ...”

“... in Europe’. There’s no view to speak of, and the station is a big shed with lots of glass and cheap detailing: blue pillars and PVC fascias. The city’s relationship to the railway, like its relationship to the world, is arrogant but insecure, high-minded but petty. Oxford was offered a branch line in 1837, with a station to be situated near ...”

“... began, Natures aetherial, human, angel, man, Beast, bird, fish, insect, what no eye can see, No glass can reach, from Infinite to thee ... Where, one step broken, the great scale’s destroy’d; From Nature’s chain whatever link you strike, Tenth, or ten thousandth, breaks the chain alike. Nisbet’s entry has the gravity and historical depth we expect ...”

“... dispense with the curatorial staff and send the collection of historic tapestries, drawings and glass on a tour of local schools. That year the council’s then leader described Morris as ‘a white imperialist’ of no relevance to Walthamstow. The spectacular row which ensued generated online petitions, national press coverage and representations from the ...”