“... laid out, in a serpentine river, pieces of water, lawns, &c, and very gracefully adorn’d with wood. One first comes to an island in which there is a castle, then near the water is a gateway, with a tower on each side, and passing between two waters there is a fine cascade from one to the other, a thatch’d house, a round pavilion on a mount, [and] Shake ...”

“... cross-braced columns, glass balustrades, glass elevators, and a modicum of stainless steel and wood. The aesthetic of early Modern architectural fantasies (in particular Mies’s early skyscraper drawings) adumbrated such things, but real buildings did not achieve details on this scale. The smaller basic window unit in a classic curtain wall of the ...”

“... in Malaysia. It is wonderfully judged, full of vitality, with stylistic naivities, like knots in wood, that authenticate it and lend it further charm: The first hot meal for thirty hours of hard going was cooked by Len Knotman. By seven, when it began to get dark, four of us turned in, and I for one fell asleep immediately. Before it got dark we found a ...”

“... a special cash award for him, then she put him into the hands of a remarkable agent called Audrey Wood who immediately began nudging him towards fame and fortune. At one stage, esteemed but not yet famous, he was engineered a job as a screenwriter at MGM. They wanted him to fashion what he termed a ‘celluloid brassiere’ for Lana Turner, but he insisted on ...”

“... in the fields, they killed chickens, canned vegetables, scrubbed floors, baked bread, chopped wood and hauled water. After days of such serf-like toil, says Baker, it was surprising that these women had energy left to nourish their mutual disdain. This disdain was not merely a matter of mothers and daughters-in-law. It reflected two conflicting views of ...”

“... to the station. What was this ill-formed, lazy train when compared to the beauty of a rustling wood? Thirsty snakes drank from puddles. Hurriedly buttoning their uniforms, sleepy stationmasters ran onto the platforms of small stations. Or ‘Ode to Softness’: Mornings are blind as newborn cats. Fingernails grow so trustfully, for a while they don’t ...”

“... word) of Strong. The first is a predictably gloomy view of a classically old-fashioned museum: wood-block floor, two benches in the centre of the gallery, paintings crammed onto the walls (20 assorted 17th-century portraits are visible in this shot alone), and no trace of an information panel beyond the tiny labels perched under each picture. The second ...”

“... V on his marriage to Isabella of Portugal. Not far from these objects is a pair of polychromed wood busts of an Ecce Homo and Mater Dolorosa by Andrea de Mena, one of few named female sculptors from the 17th century. Andrea was the daughter of the sculptor Pedro de Mena and entered a convent aged twenty, perhaps to focus on her craft without the hindrance ...”

“... chairs, shelves and cupboards covered in boldly patterned plastic laminate. At the same time Michael Graves was designing buildings, kettles and chairs that seemed close relatives to things in old cartoon films. Such work defined ‘postmodern’ better than words could. I wouldn’t call Arad that, but his work seemed to signal the end of the age of the ...”

“... Michael Kelly has produced a vivid, responsible account of his own itinerary, as a contributor to New Republic, the Boston Globe and the New York Times, through the Gulf War: from Baghdad to Amman; on to Egypt, Palestine, Israel, Saudi Arabia; into Kuwait and back into Iraq, via Basra; thence to Kurdistan. There are few sops to terrible beauty, whatever Kelly’s dust-jacket champions may say, and no excessive enthusiasm for the darker side of his material, either in the abandoned Iraqi torture chambers of Kuwait City or on the road to Basra ...”

“... In the middle of his new book Michael Baxandall wonders whether the ‘complex Newtonian-Lockean sense of how we see’, which he has just expertly expounded, provides any ‘purchase’ on Chardin’s painting, A Lady Taking Tea, to which ‘our primary explanatory duty is due.’ It is bracing to discover that we have this duty but I am puzzled by what exactly needs explanation ...”

“... exactly should enter the public catalogue of our lives, and who gets to decide? In​ 2010, Graeme Wood discovered that a former Harvard classmate, Phineas Upham, and his mother, Nancy, had been arrested for hiding $11 million in Swiss bank accounts and sneaking cash back into America. Not without schadenfreude, Wood set up ...”

“... were threaded. I remember the sensation of sandpaper, the heat of it after it was rubbed on wood and its roughness when I held it to my face.When he finished the model, my father took it to Rabbies, a restaurant he co-owned on Burns Statue Square in Ayr, which served steak with tomatoes cut into Little Red Riding Hood baskets. A copy of the Selkirk ...”

“... When I think ideally of ‘the novel’, this is the one I recur to. One of the many pleasures of Michael Gorra’s book is that he too has loved this novel since he studied it in college, and wants to share his passion for it. He has also taught it for many years, at Smith College, and he has written the kind of patient, sensitive, acute study that gifted ...”

“... peasants.’) Sendero’s pedagogical origins made a difference too: as the American journalist Michael Smith argued in 1992, Sendero was able to spread ‘almost anywhere’ there was ‘a blackboard and benches’. In some ways, Sendero’s doctrinal inflexibility and its distance – physical and ideological – from the rest of the Peruvian left were ...”