“... her to Colm Tóibín, and she did her ‘bottle through the table’ trick, which he put straight into the novel he was writing (The Story of the Night). At the Groucho Club, there would be too much Sancerre with various Britpop loons, a bit of napping under the snooker table, and a lot of drinking with artists who were busy inventing their ...”

“... The American flag was planted, though there was some awkwardness in getting it to stand up straight and to make it look like it was waving in the non-existent lunar wind. (When the Eagle took off back to Earth, the flag fell over.) When they landed, President Nixon phoned long-distance to declare that ‘for every American this has to be the proudest ...”

“... source of conflict or grief?’ On the other, the new energies she has found in loving Harry surge straight back into her work: ‘The need to pay homage to the transitive, the flight, the great soup of being in which we actually live.’ Self-expression,​ desire, a get-out-of-jail-free card to protect against ‘bad consequences’: it isn’t hard to see ...”

“... and easy extrapolation. Belton is not one of them; he is as fastidious, though not so succinct, as Michael Frayn in his play Copenhagen. Heisenberg said in his memoirs that ‘science is rooted in conversations.’ He seemed to open the door, in the friendliest fashion, for the novelist and the playwright. Schrödinger’s formulation was darker: ‘Science is ...”

“... The vote​ for Donald Trump may well have been what Michael Moore called the ‘biggest fuck-you ever recorded in human history’, delivered by the white working class to spite ‘the establishment’. But it isn’t just the size of the fuck-you that matters; it’s also who delivers it. A fuck-you can be sent via satirical parties (Iceland’s Best Party won the election for mayor of Reykjavik; Hungary’s Two-Tailed Dog Party had a hand in sabotaging Viktor Orbán’s recent anti-refugee referendum), or subversive parties (the Pirates), or grassroots movements turned parties (Podemos ...”

“... study, means that there is no possibility of creating a ‘fairy taxonomy’, which would set straight all the stories, beliefs and motifs, and reconstruct a long lost original mythology (as Jacob Grimm attempted to do for the Germanic world in his Deutsche Mythologie of 1835). The desire for one was certainly there. Beating Grimm very slightly to the ...”

“... with windows onto 53rd Street orients visitors in relation to the city. As before, we can head straight after we enter, and turn right towards the Sculpture Garden, up to the vast atrium, and on to the galleries of the 2004 extension above, which is where most of the temporary shows will now be held. Or we can turn immediately left, towards the new Geffen ...”

“... Leiden until they discovered that Dutch cities weren’t best suited for keeping teenagers on the straight and narrow; next, they boarded a rackety wine ship, the Mayflower, and sailed off into the Atlantic. Their destination was Virginia, which after a rough start was now a flourishing colony. Planters there exported tobacco, and in 1619 convened the first ...”

“... up to secure the seized ship’s entry to Texel). At the neighbouring table, Lieutenant Commander Michael Sturm, deputy US naval attaché at the embassy in London, and his wife, Rachel, sat next to Lieutenant Jonathan Aylett of the Royal Navy. Sturm was dressed in ceremonial uniform and was beaming; Aylett was in his civvies and had the air of a man who’d ...”

“... compromise with the new Post-Modern order: though he never fell into the historical pastiche of Michael Graves or Charles Moore, he did become more imagistic in his design. The great interest of this retrospective is to trace his passage from the early grunge work, through an elliptical Pop style, to the lavish ‘gestural aesthetic’ of the present. For ...”

“... he denies).At least in its early seasons, Sex and the City was a comedy in which four single, straight, middle-class white women riffed on urban relationships in groundbreakingly explicit terms, from farting in bed with your lover to circumcision preferences; it didn’t deserve its later reputation as a paean to brand shopping. Eight years after it ...”

“... drew a different response: he was sure he could make something better. For Kubrick (according to Michael Herr, his friend and collaborator on the screenplay of Full Metal Jacket), ‘there was definitely such a thing as a bad movie, but there was no movie not worth seeing.’ He told Herr in an exuberant moment that The Godfather must be the greatest movie ...”

“... reason she asked at the library for something on Larkin but seeing his photograph gave the book straight back: ‘He looked too much like Sergeant Bilko.’28 January. I switch on the Antiques Roadshow where someone is showing an expert a drawing by E.H. Shepard, the illustrator of Winnie the Pooh. It’s a cartoon or an illustration dated 1942, entitled ...”

“... movement saw themselves as armed militants to the Officials’ political compromisers. For them, Michael Collins had said all there was to say about the value of words in the struggle against the Crown when he gave the oration at the funeral of Thomas Ashe, who died on hunger strike in 1917: ‘That volley which we have just heard is the only speech which it ...”

“... detailed treatment in this biography that one senses a stronger than usual urge to set the record straight. It centres on the much debated question of whether Spender can really have been, as he always claimed, unaware that Encounter was indirectly funded by the CIA and by British intelligence. Spender had become co-editor of the magazine in 1953; despite ...”