“... engines imply plots. Playing Poirot, questioning the suspect object and doing a little background reading, lets you see the ways their environment shaped them, and how it is possible to deduce from shape and position the way parts work together.I have been to this part of the museum more than once to look at a particular engine: the Rolls-Royce Merlin, famous ...”

“... the source of the family’s descent is signalled by a dice box and a betting book)? Or, after reading a newspaper account of a fishing boat lost at sea, produce an equivalent of Frank Bramley’s picture of a young woman collapsed on the floor of a low room lit by the grey light of A Hopeless Dawn? These are images you can enjoy, or make jokes about, but ...”

“... ranked with Sapper, Dornford Yates and similar figures; and to assert that he is not only worth reading (which the general public has never forgotten), but also worth reading seriously. In her fine biography of Buchan Janet Adam Smith earlier argued the case for the author: Dr Daniell develops her points and has little ...”

“... Sir Peter Hall is a man of Notes. He is a director of plays who has become Director of the National Theatre. The skills of play directors are not those of performers (like his predecessor at the National, Lord Olivier). Play directors pride themselves on their ability to give what they call Notes. This sort of Note (scarcely recognised by dictionaries) is not the sort manual workers make, in notebooks or on notepaper: it is mouth work ...”

“... chosen to show how maps enable action and enter into argument; they are there to be read. Grim reading some of them make, too. The 1941 map on which the ethnic composition of Slovakia is set out, town by town, guided Jew and Gypsy-hunters to the places where potential concentration camp victims were thickest. Made with similar efficiency, earlier on, is ...”

“... Yet even if we all say the same things about the exhilaration and the pleasure we feel when reading black on purple-black or red on red on red, finding the depths in the pictures suggested by some of Rothko’s statements is now, and probably always was, an act of faith that requires a sort of self-hypnosis. ‘Red on Maroon’ (1959), section four ...”

“... simple statements made in a recognisable, resonant tone of voice: think of an operatic bass reading the news headlines. He liked big type and never lost the letter-cutter’s feeling for pattern-making. There is a cover here for The Georgian Buildings of Bristol in which the lines of Fry’s Baskerville are as close-packed as the lettering on a ...”

“... Riders, Iscariot Blues, Strangers from Paradise, Blue Stag (All Fours). The colour is so dark that reading them is difficult, reproducing them even more so; it is as though you were looking at the world through the dark blue filter of the cinema’s ‘day for night’. The struggle to see just what’s going on – to know why musicians are playing on a ...”

“... the text it contains. It is a remarkable piece of work which has had a long life, in art college reading lists in particular; a more active one certainly than Kenneth Clark’s Civilisation, to which it was an indirect riposte. Schmoller’s anger was misplaced. He might have loathed the look, but here at least was a book which was all of a piece. In ...”

“... no more a statement of what goes on in a building than the flowers on the receptionist’s desk. Reading Ward-Jackson you follow the transition from the peopled wall to the free-standing but unloved sculptural statement, ‘the proverbial turd in the plaza’.When the Broadgate development was being planned, the decision to include major pieces of sculpture ...”

“... it? Then she is in London. There are phone calls about a reconciliation. Later what we have been reading is read by Jake. In the last section the themes are so interwoven that ‘when?’ and ‘where?’ must be inferred circumstantially. The conflict between storytelling and true description, making sense of life (which is like a story) or making life into ...”

“... to the second century, or earlier. It describes a contest in magic which took place between St Peter and St Paul, at Rome. The miracles which Paul performed were so impressive that some Christians even wondered whether he was Christ, come again. Paul told them that he would come flying through the sky and arrive at the seventh hour at the city gate. At the ...”

“... I was a friend and devoted admirer of Peter Cook for thirty years but I never realised until I read this book how much our early lives had overlapped. We were born in the same week into the same sort of family. His father, like mine, was a colonial servant rushing round the world hauling down the Imperial flag. At one stage both fathers were ensnared in the argument about the most appropriate capital for the West Indies Federation: an argument as vexed as it was futile since the Federation lasted only a few months ...”

“... dementia praecox, as a definite syndrome by Emil Kraepelin in 1899. But a more historically-minded reading delivers a rather different interpretation of the coincidence between the identification of the chronic schizophrenic as a progressively deteriorating type and the transformation of the asylum into a custodial institution for the socially unproductive. On ...”

“... with the inquisitive faces peering around corners and the eloquent back of the figure who sits reading. In the case of Christ Healing the Sick,(also known as the Hundred Guilder Print) drawings exist which show Rembrandt thinking about the gestures of the invalids who surround Christ: they were not so much studies which arrived at a conclusion that could ...”