“... placating and schmoozing with union leaders than with any other group. Robert Taylor’s close account of the TUC has in it some wonderfully revealing passages on these (and other) periods: none so rich as the gathering of 1 June 1969 at Chequers which brought together Wilson, his First (and Employment) Secretary Barbara Castle, Jack Jones of the ...”

“... was naturally postponed to the end of the war. Hoberman places the German surrender at Stalingrad close to the release of Song of Russia, a movie about the invasion as experienced by ordinary Russians. Again, there was nothing peculiar then about such a treatment and such a title. Robert Rossen, the most gifted member of the far left milieu, was advised about ...”

“... artists like Robert Rauschenberg and Jasper Johns as well as the 23-year-old Frank Stella, the enfant terrible of geometric abstraction. Colour-field painters like Morris Louis, Kenneth Noland and Jules Olitski, whose work Newman had influenced but didn’t encourage, were also on the rise, and Greenberg had swung much of his support to ...”

“... instalment, the remaining £20 to follow God knows when, & have now got the picture. Mother & Frank [Beckett’s brother] can’t resist it much … It is nice to have Morning on one’s wall that is always morning, and a setting out without the coming home.’ Later both men wrote separately to McGreevy to say that they had bumped into one another at a ...”

“... feeling of satisfaction. The first is Gallery Nine at Burlington House, a square room where superb Frank Steallas of his black period confront us from the back wall while in the middle of the floor, humped in silence, is Robert Morris’s big low cage of a steel sculpture of 1967 and to either side whitish paintings by Robert Ryman and Agnes Martin. No ...”

“... next. (The peripatetic paradigm is Sir Stephen Spender, but Macdonald made an effort to run him close.) Third, he was an adopter of causes and had a pronounced tendency to look for the orphaned ones. If a thing was already sayable, he would be that much less interested in defending its right to be said. Excised from the New Republic’s review of ...”

“... prose that takes Rosen through a generous amount of mainly instrumental and vocal music at very close range indeed. What must be said immediately is how well, how enviably well, Rosen knows this music, its secrets, its astonishing harmonic and structural innovations, and the problems and pleasures of its performance: he writes not as a musicologist but as ...”

“... of sexual rivalry arose. For instance, she backed a photograph she had taken of the wife of a close friend (later lover) with a nude one of herself before giving it to him. In order to obtain her photographs, she often misled and lied to her subjects, and all the more so if they were women. Several of them decribe how she would lie in wait for ...”

“... Stewart meets the main challenge of The Tale of Two Cities head-on with a long and exceptionally close commentary designed to redeem Carton’s ‘It is a far, far better thing ...’ from its melodramatic stereotype. The scene, in Stewart’s words, ‘is not just an exercise in but an exploration of the style of dying as a narrative act, the clefts of its ...”

“... royal relationships across the generations have often been strained and distant, rather than close and affectionate. When Victoria and Albert married off their children, it was with dynastic considerations in mind rather than emotional fulfilment or personal happiness. Most eldest sons, forever waiting to become king, have not been on the best of terms ...”

“... to the English reader because it leaves open a question about agency which our language tends to close: it is neither ‘I illuminate myself’ nor ‘I am being illuminated,’ but somewhere undecidably between the two (Ungaretti is fond of such constructions and of the uncertainties they bring into focus). The timescale is no more definite: released from ...”

“... for Variety describes present-day actors as ‘fey’, ‘goofy’ and ‘boy-men’, and Frank Miller (director of The Spirit: ‘Rookie cop returns from the beyond as The Spirit’) believes that ‘Hollywood is great at producing male actors but sucks at producing men.’ Kanfer backs his columnists up with the opinion of Harvey C. Mansfield, ‘a ...”

“... by alien-hand syndrome. One of his hands appeared to act independently. ‘His left hand would close a drawer as soon as the right hand had opened it, or undo buttons that had just been done up.’ Before my operation I made advances to a nurse in the lift at the Policlinico Hospital. A quarter of a century on, I can remember Gilly’s ...”

“... because you’ve left yours out.’ Tóibín is drawn to similar furnishings: ‘I have a close relationship with silence, with things withheld, things known and not said,’ he writes, and this relationship, he feels, brings him close to Bishop. As well as being a kindred spirit, Bishop is like other writers and ...”

“... death may be cheated and learn how they must always protect the sound seed from the weeds, and how close breeding makes fine types of stock.’ In other words, his ruralism entailed anti-semitism and eugenics. The High Tory Eliot kept his distance from these doctrines of Lymington’s, but like Gardiner, the two looked towards a dirt-kicking, muscular ...”