“... Peter Sedgwick has given us an informative, penetrating, witty and critical account of anti-psychiatry as represented by Laing, Szasz, Goffman and Foucault. The central ambition of anti-psychiatry has been to replace the so-called medical model of mental illness by a ‘labelling’ one, according to which the behaviours which provoked diagnoses of psychopathology were not manifestations of some underlying pathology but merely conduct found obnoxious by the labellers ...”

“... narrator, finds his partner collapsed in their garden, face up in the North Carolina sun. Frank will recover from the immediate effects of his stroke, but the book charts his decline into physical debility and dementia, as well as Wendell’s increasingly desperate efforts to care for him. Care doesn’t always look the way one might ...”

“... photograph on the jacket gives the story a sharper edge: Halle bears some resemblance to Peter Sellers in one of his manic roles. That Pei, architect of the Louvre Pyramid, thought Halle’s study out of order is not surprising, but he was mistaken if he thought it crudely reductionist. As a prelude to his analysis Halle describes the kinds of house ...”

“... I haven’heard. He is Daron Aric Hagen, and Shining Brow is an opera about the early life of Frank Lloyd Wright, commissioned by Madison Opera, Wisconsin, Wright’s home state. The work was premièred there in April, but not having heard it, I cannot speak for the opera’s music. That, though, would not appear to be much of a drawback. Muldoon’s text ...”

“... John Sparrow, Henry Yorke, Alan Pryce-Jones, Osbert Lancaster, Robert Byron, Anthony Powell, Peter Quennell, Tom Driberg, Harold Acton, Christopher Sykes, Randolph Churchill, W.H. Auden, and lots of others, including Gaitskell once more (‘Hugh, may I stroke your bottom?’ ‘Oh, I suppose so, if you must’). With Auden he went to bed; also, according ...”

“... one by Franz Kline, the other by Willem de Kooning (they accompany poems written on the plates by Frank O’Hara and Harold Rosenberg respectively), a medium that makes delicate scratching and hatching possible is turned over to coarse brush strokes and crabbed handwriting. Yet both these plates and Lewis’s derive part of their force from a characteristic ...”

“... sorting out a large number of poems into appropriate volumes had been undertaken with the help of Frank Bidart, and those that went into The Dolphin were personal, including not only references to Elizabeth Hardwick, but embarrassing quotations from her letters and phone calls. Lowell made no attempt to get her permission to use this material – it would ...”

“... buildings.The Pritzker Prize juries (this year’s was headed by Lord Rothschild and included Frank Gehry, who won the prize in 1989) have, over the years, chosen a significant number of winners (Gehry, Rem Koolhaas and now Hadid) whose reputations, at the time of the award, depended to a great extent on small buildings or on their contributions to a ...”

“... impression is dated 1946. In the same series of twenty or so titles were How to Draw ‘Planes by Frank Wootton and Tanks and How to Draw Them by Terence Cuneo – both highly successful workers in long-lasting sub-genres. You can still order prints by Wootton of Spitfires chasing Messerschmitts, prints of steam locomotives by Cuneo and, indeed, prints of ...”

“... poet), columnist for the Wire, broadcaster, and author of the monumental and magnificent folly, Frank Zappa: The Negative Dialectics of Poodle Play. Watson, if he wanted to carry his argument outside the poetry ghetto, had to adopt protective colouring, find a synopsis that was acceptable to the culture brokers, a name that would stand up. This is no easy ...”

“... why Lord and Lady Wilde paid those school fees. Merlin Holland’s essay on his grandfather in Peter Raby’s Cambridge Companion to Oscar Wilde illuminates these appropriations by charting a series of significant errors through multiple versions of Wilde’s history. Holland takes us back to one of the most familiar scenes from the life of Wilde: the bad ...”

“... Not long after that Lessing made her own way ‘home’ to the bleak London of 1949 with her son Peter, little money, a head full of ideas and a diary soon energetically full of dates. She admitted that Walking in the Shade, the second volume of her autobiography, which covers the period 1949-62, was harder to write than the first: ‘The older I get,’ she ...”

“... in Mark’s Gospel, which in general avoids such affirmations and times this one to coincide with Peter’s denial. Klassen is sure that at the time of the arrest Jesus addresses Judas (and no other disciple, anywhere) as ‘friend’, but does not acknowledge that hetaire can be otherwise translated – for instance, James Moffat, admittedly rather ...”

“... the theories and experiments of European Modernists (architects and others) and the example of Frank Lloyd Wright are all evident. The 1947 show seems, with hindsight, to have been planned to provide a podium on which reductive structures with temple-like geometry (that’s to say, Mies’s American work: the Illinois Institute of Technology buildings, the ...”

“... anthems Hymn to St Cecilia (classy words by Auden, usefully decent treble solo)♪ and Hymn to St Peter (eerie plainsong effect, also with coveted treble solo opportunity).♪ In the cathedral, thrillingly at night, that enormous building dark and mysterious beyond our spotlit oasis, we thrashed our way through an evening performance of Noye’s ...”