“... at the Central School of Arts and Crafts, where she studied illustration and textile design and took life drawing classes with Bernard Meninsky, who was known for his heavy black charcoal lines (Cooke preferred a 3H pencil). She went on to study sculpture at Goldsmiths – getting the highest mark in the country in her first exam – and pottery at ...”

“... She rose from the not-so-bonny Bank of Clyde (Bombed to a pit for its pains in ’41). Meanwhile, John Masefield wrote a handsome poem (‘Shredding a trackway like a mile of snow . . .’) And Harry Lauder roamed the yard with pride. She ploughed across the Atlantic in four days, Loud with the ‘rich and famous’, only the seasick Inlaid pianos suffering ...”

“... the barracks adjacent, and military sirens tearing Open the heavy heat.            It took – or seemed To take – no time at all for the venom to prove, point By careful point, what it meant. I found Myself sweating too, trying To recall the serpentine journeys made by adventurers such as Mungo Park And Richard Burton, and the weeping jungles ...”

“... barrels, bottles and jars and loading them onto horses and carts and repurposed ploughs. People took whatever they could find. Francis Saveer, a mason, boarded the ship and managed to extract a piece of silk, eighteen rows of buttons, a jacket and a waistcoat. His servant took ‘two old jerkins and some old ...”

“... of the independence of the worker in stone, plaster, brick or wood accelerated. The drawing-men took over from the making-men. Conception and execution became separate provinces. Thinking, not building, became the architect’s highest achievement. Finally, some time around the third quarter of the 18th century, architecture became a proper profession. The ...”

“... to the text may not have been so different from that of an author like Jane Austen who, in John Bayley’s words, ‘set her characters going to see what they might do’, or Pushkin, who in the midst of composing Eugene Onegin wrote to a friend: ‘My Tatiana has gone off and got married. I never would have expected it of her.’ No doubt the drafters ...”

“... The first thing Alzheimer’s disease took away from Iris Murdoch was her luminous powers. At a conference in Israel in 1994, she was unable to answer her audience’s questions. In 1995, she completed, with great difficulty, her 27th novel, Jackson’s Dilemma, in which readers found several errors and inconsistencies; it was to be her last ...”

“... length of time and that would be the movie,’ he said. The ‘tests’ – whose subjects include John Ashbery, Lou Reed, Dennis Hopper and Susan Sontag – were shot on 100-foot rolls of black and white film at 24 frames per second, then screened, almost slo-mo, at 16 fps. The results varied: Lou Reed, who had studied drama, brings a Coke bottle as a prop ...”

“... his innocence to the umpires: look, ump, nothing in my pockets, honest! In the fallout, Bancroft took some of the blame, but even more was taken by the two older players in the leadership group, the captain, Steve Smith, and his right-hand man, David Warner, who had instructed Bancroft to ball-tamper. Smith and Warner were suspended for a year, Bancroft for ...”

“... teaching in schools, in the Leavis manner, via pairings of admirable against deplorable texts: John Clare compared with ‘a film song’; Mark Twain versus a shampoo advertisement; but also Donne versus Shelley. Because he founded his literary criticism on social criticism, deploring the effects of industrialisation in the 19th century and commodity ...”

“... Nature of Poetry’, of how some lines and whole verses just came into his head, while the rest took months of labour and were seldom entirely satisfactory. The feeling of two separate processes, though no doubt an experience common with poets, makes Housman’s verse peculiarly satisfying, although there is no need to enter the competition, dangled before ...”

“... which has been reprinted in two editions since the war, with introductions by André Gide and John Carey. It is arguably Carey’s edition that has been chiefly responsible not only for the high reputation of the Memoirs and Confessions in England but also for the assumption that none of Hogg’s other fictions is worth bothering with. Carey dismissed ...”

“... John Donne​ is a modern rediscovery. His reputation, high among his contemporaries, fell after their time, along with those of other 17th-century metaphysical poets who would wait equally long for rehabilitation. The late 17th century and the 18th, committed to orderliness of metre and feeling, disliked the ‘forced’ and ‘unnatural’ rhythms of his verse, his ‘false’ conceits, his unruly sensuality ...”

“... It is sad to know we’ve been robbed of the songs that were to come from John Lennon. He was a master of his craft and made music that was personal and unique. In partnership with Paul McCartney, and later as a solo artist, he wrote songs that have become the soundtrack of the Sixties and Seventies. He covered a wide range of subjects in his work, from the Vietnam conflict and women’s rights to his own search for peace of mind, and in doing so, he became a mirror for two generations ...”

“... themselves perhaps only a generation or two away from the farm in Mayo or Meath. The clergy who took the boat to Liverpool were for the most part the sons of so-called strong farmers, men who owned a comfortable number of acres, in contrast to the impoverished small tenants, cottiers and farm labourers. The social background of these aspirants to the ...”