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“... follow the homecoming of men for whom home no longer exists. Edric’s latest novel, In Zodiac Light, revisits similar terrain. Set in the City of London Mental Hospital, Dartford, its protagonist is the poet-composer Ivor Gurney, who was a patient there from December 1922 until his death from tuberculosis 15 years later. Edric’s fascination with lives ...”

“... the phylloxera epidemic. Sparkenbroke is about the life and death of a creative aristocrat. Lewis Alison, the hero of The Fountain, is with the Naval Brigade defending Antwerp in 1914, and is interned in Holland. This had been Morgan’s own experience, and both he and his hero spent a quiet war on parole at a Dutch castle. Morgan occupied himself chiefly in ...”

“... on late 19th-century writings about ‘the nature of gender and human sexual response’, as Alison Hennegan has done in a recent essay,* you come to a rather different conclusion. Hennegan revels in the subversions of normality which colour the literature of the period and which, although checked by the outcome of the Wilde trial, were never stamped out ...”

“... status was uppermost in Tincknell’s mind as he led me, together with his head of communications, Alison Dykes, through freshly landscaped grounds – hardwood decking, raised flowerbeds, gravel pathways – towards the sales suite, pointing out on the way a scale model of the power station about the size of the average family home. ‘Isn’t it ...”

“... modest invalid knew enough to know that she was living in an age of prescientific ferment. One of Alison Winter’s main points in Mesmerised is that, in an age when so much of what was being discovered seemed extraordinary, a belief in the widely attested mesmeric phenomena was no more fanciful than a belief in electricity. The history of mesmerism, or ...”

“... could hope for. If her paintings are ‘quintessentially postwar’, as the show’s curator, Jane Alison, puts it, then that seems again to have more to do with surface texture than with subject. Visiting a Mondrian retrospective at the Whitechapel Gallery in 1955, Themerson wrote that she remembered the ‘old, withered woman who was sitting there in the ...”

“... to avoid the tendency of ceramics shows to treat their subject as hobby-craft, is mercifully light on the details of glazes and firing temperatures. What is important to understand is the extent to which Rie invented not only new forms but an original way of working that suited her both aesthetically and practically. It was a technique rapid enough to ...”

“... but I kept returning to the website, and I let the computer do its thing: the green recording light above my screen switched on and I could see myself projected into the gallery as visitors paced below. I was the watcher watched, watching myself being watched – a delirious mise en abyme.There’s nothing unfamiliar about remote video monitoring: it’s ...”

“... Radical candour was a point of principle; not to speak his mind was out of the question. Alison Garnham and Susi Woodhouse, surmising that there was never a time when he wasn’t like this, quote in their biography of Keller a wonderful fan letter he wrote aged sixteen to his idol, the violinist Bronislaw Huberman, after a concert, to the effect ...”

“... observes, an unacknowledged arm of the Foreign Office. Garlake quotes a letter, first brought to light in Frances Donaldson’s history of the British Council, in which a member of the Foreign Office admitted that the Cold War ‘is in essence a battle for men’s minds’ and that ‘the British Council is one of our chief agencies for fighting it.’ From ...”

“... else in A Vision is symbolic, close enough to apocalyptic literature to be irradiated by its light, the 13th Cycle is merely imaginary, too distant to be much more than the idiosyncrasy of a mind which could apprehend conflict in terms far richer than it could ever apprehend unity. It is at this point that Yeats’s occult belief passes into his social ...”

“... Like Professor Ehrlich, Nancy Reich, in her thorough biography of Clara Schumann, throws new light on the position of women in music. The status of the German musician is underlined in the portrait of her father, Friedrich Wieck, a prosperous piano teacher, and family patriarch of an uninviting kind. His plan for his talented daughter was not dissimilar ...”

“... But there were other things at stake here too. Reading Banham’s book, or the essays by Alison and Peter Smithson later collected as Ordinariness and Light, with its epigraphs from Aneurin Bevan, or the various texts of Team 10, the international corresponding group that included most early Brutalists, it is clear ...”

“... combed them through and examined them in a critical and scholarly fashion, holding them up to the light of previous historical and social theories, and ordering them according to ideas and findings of his own. His book progresses from a long-term discussion of the geology, history and social organisation of the community of the Nailsworth valley in ...”

“... remember that in the 1960s ambitious art could still justify its reliance on painting (rather than light works or earthworks or sheer emptiness) precisely because it was the medium most able to concretise the contemporary image world: Foster does not make this mistake. Nor does he fail to see that the 1960s painters were well aware of the way their pictorial ...”