“... specific to period and place: the Rev. Henry Rich is described on the first page as coming ‘straight out of Mansfield Park’, and it is a matter for debate whether he succeeds in emerging from that rarefied world. It is partly because Henry Rich’s obsession with Time – which at one point he characterises as moving in our imaginations from left to ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... hearing the word “hypersonics”,’ one official remarked to an industry sponsored conference. Michael Griffin, undersecretary of defence for research and engineering, a hypersonics enthusiast, has spoken of the need for ‘maybe thousands’ of hypersonic weapons. ‘This takes us back to the Cold War,’ he announced cheerfully, ‘where at one point we ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... With no more murmurs in the Liberal ranks In Labour’s there is total consternation. If Michael Foot tore out his hair in hanks He could not look more prone to perturbation. The right wing loudly calls the left wing cranks And no one stays calm in the altercation Except for Tony Benn, who sucks contentedly On his prop pipe and stares ahead ...”

“... way in which they are compelled to fulfil their ‘evil fortunes’. ‘Evil fortunes’ is not a straight translation of Dante’s ‘sad pass’, nor does ‘accursed’ convey the complex, almost benign understanding in Dante’s line about the book the lovers were reading when they fell: Galeotto fu’l libro e chi lo scrisse. A work of gallantry and ...”

“... a long flight to Jakarta. ‘Eric Lustbader?’ suggested Sean, and I shook my head. I’d seen Michael Herr sending dispatches. The hours flew by. The Beach is studded with non-cinematic references to popular culture of the same Eighties vintage: Atari and Nintendo video games, Airfix models, Tintin and Asterix, David Attenborough’s Life on ...”

“... and – if you were female, or an ambivalent male – darkly unsafe. ‘He was lovable,’ Michael Young said, ‘because he did not mind whether he was loved or not.’ Of course, this was artifice: he craved popularity and acclaim as much as any performer; but he was also capable of standing back and appreciating the wider picture. If clever people ...”

“... comparison between these two kinds, the one inert, the other progressive, is made in terms drawn straight from the book on Evolution: Between the first morality and the second there is thus all the distance which separates rest from movement. The first is held to be immutable. If it changes, it at once forgets that it has changed or does not admit to the ...”

“... water. As you walk through the Yosemite valley with the colossal front of El Capitan standing up straight and steely to your left and the hunched mass of Tissiack (Half Dome) to your right, its curve sheared off frontally, you feel your shoulders brace and your brain contract as though you were having to hold apart the irresistible gravity and closure of the ...”

“... vote reflected national percentages almost exactly. But in 1988 it produced a higher vote for Michael Dukakis, against George Bush, than any other state bar one. The residents of Sherman Hill attest to a strong left-wing strain in Iowa’s politics which has been influential and may be so again. They worry about health, education, environment, with the ...”

“... 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 ...”