“... the smokey darkness. These endearing celebrations of place glisten in the firelight, when the rock fields they represent are lost in the inevitable sea-fret, the mist drifting down from the hills.But they have to go, these images. They have to be stacked away in the reserve collection, along with the Fontana, the emulsion-on-hardboard multi-head portraits on ...”

“... Stalinism. He and Robert Conquest had also been amused by advance word of Larkin’s letters to Barbara Pym (‘I bet they were a bit different in tone from what he writes to you and me, eh?’). At the same time, he was unsettled by finding out how much Larkin had kept from him of his arrangements in Hull – principally the depth of his involvements with ...”

“... the survivors, had prepared me for this. In Corso’s hutch, his minders begged for copies of Barbara Pym, while Gregory spoke wistfully of Philip Larkin. Denton Welch was William Burroughs’s main intellectual squeeze. Ferlinghetti had high hopes for Jeremy Reed. The Beats were now heritage fodder, a potential Bloomsbury group. There was even talk of ...”

“... and officials who carried out the policy and by the peasants who chose to slaughter animals, burn fields and boycott cultivation in protest. Beyond fixing blame, however, the tempting conclusion of intentionality is unwarranted: the case for a purposeful famine is weakly supported by the evidence and relies on a very strained interpretation of ...”

“... a Northumbrian, and The Anglo-Saxon Chronicle, compiled in Wessex. But the main suspect here, as Barbara Yorke points out in her contribution to the report, is King Penda, whose story – Mercia being in the middle of England – is one of continued conflict against the Anglo-Saxon kingdoms of Northumbria to the north, East Anglia to the east, Wessex to the ...”

“... 1908, Ray and some friends travelled around the country in a horse-drawn caravan. They camped in fields, cooked outdoors and sold badges to publicise their speeches, delivered from the caravan. Once, they held a meeting on a lake, with the audience bobbing in boats. At the end of that summer, Ray wrote that the vote was ‘the only important thing in an ...”

“... their minds up.Old Mother Riley apart, there weren’t many funny women. I didn’t go for Gracie Fields nor did I understand why when she appeared everybody suddenly burst out singing – songs in films always something to be endured rather than enjoyed. Still, Gracie Fields in her Northern-mill epics and excursions to ...”

“... by a friend of their father’s. Mondrian learned to paint as a teenager with his uncle out in the fields, outings for which Frits Mondriaan dressed in a double-breasted suit, starched white shirt and silk necktie. When he decided he wanted to become an art teacher – his father wouldn’t let him train to be an artist, on the grounds that it wasn’t a real ...”

“... the difficulties’ of being an artist and ‘Artists who struggle’. The first category included Barbara Hepworth (the only female British artist Berger reviewed during this period) alongside John Bratby and a number of prominent foreigners – Gabo, Klee, Pollock, Dubuffet and Germaine Richier among them. The second, more positive category included Henry ...”

“... keeps mocking his search for an ending: he finds himself on a long dull boulevard called Elysian Fields; a fanatic tells him of ‘reincarns’ who walk the earth for ever as punishment for their past lives. If the city will provide no ending, Raban will go off and make one. He sails his boat into the Delta, looking for the line dividing green and blue water ...”

“... properties and limited to neat, regulated doses of abandon. Dance music moved away from fields and edgelands and back into towns and cities, aided by the loosening of laws around the sale of alcohol (from 1988 pubs were permitted to stay open throughout the afternoon, in line with the deregulatory mindset of the decade). ‘If nothing ...”

“... to anger friends and colleagues. His Centre for the Study of Democratic Institutions at Santa Barbara was to be, intellectually, a successor to the ‘College’ at Chicago, but the same defects of personality were apparent on the Pacific as on Lake Michigan. The Centre was eventually absorbed into the University of California and after a short period was ...”

“... window: She opened her curtains, and looked out towards the bit of road that lay in view, with fields beyond, outside the entrance-gates. On the road there was a man with a bundle on his back and a woman carrying her baby; in the field she could see figures moving – perhaps the shepherd with his dog. Far off in the bending sky was the pearly light; and ...”

“... exploits make for a Bret Easton Ellis cocktail of privilege, debauchery and brand-names. ‘Barbara, the cocaine abuser, had encouraged me, after a night at Danceteria, to chop lines of that fell drug with her on her parents’ Roy Lichtenstein print.’ True co-dependency is achieved when he hooks up with Jen, a girlfriend who also gets regularly ...”

“... have pulled off the robbery that funded the Brinks-Mat job at Heathrow. Knight was once married to Barbara Windsor, soubrette, Carry On whoopee cushion, diminutive EastEnders matriarch. Windsor was of course born in Shoreditch, before escaping to the wannabe suburb of Stamford Hill. Hoxton and Shoreditch were on the wrong side of the Roman wall, a dog-end ...”