“... reliable and businesslike cabinet supporters: Sir George Grey, Charles’s nephew, and Sir Charles Wood, Charles’s son-in-law. Commentators fond of political flamboyance considered both men dispensable, but dispensing with them was not on the agenda. George, who inherited the smaller of the family’s two Northumberland estates, at Fallodon, served as home ...”

“... work they undertook and the erosion 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 ...”

“... Society is an important collection of new essays by 13 of the pupils and associates of Professor Michael Wallace-Hadrill presented to him on his retirement from the Chichele Chair in Oxford. Despite the varieties of subject-matter and approach in these essays and of gender and age among the contributors, the degree of coherence claimed for this volume by the ...”

“... Michael Fried, who is also a poet, has a dense, self-questioning, fervent prose style. Somewhat perversely he has, over the last three decades – that is, since his doctoral dissertation on Manet was printed as a special issue of Artforum in 1969 – put this prose to the service of art-historical scholarship. It might have been otherwise ...”

“... taught agriculture to humanity. ‘It stands around four feet tall and appears to be old, its wood stained dark, the information on the label imprecise.’ The shopkeepers tell Tunde that they believe the headdress to be ‘authentic’. He bristles at the word:It was in a shop among the unrelated treasures white people had collected by fair means or foul ...”

“... its Free Statehood: on 2 December 1921 he crossed the Irish Sea from Holyhead on the Cambria – Michael Collins and Erskine Childers, on their way back from the Treaty negotiations in London, were making the same journey. The Cambria collided with a schooner (killing three men) and when Ford arrived in Galway he discovered his ancestral home was in ...”

“... nearly always alone. In the wilderness he lived on bread and tea, boiled on a fire of fossil wood or shavings from the underside of his sledge. To save weight he usually did without blankets and ‘made my bed of rich, spicy boughs, elastic and warm’. In a cleft three miles back from the brow of El Capitan, ‘I lay down and thought of the time when ...”

“... over pit closures; the intensified conflict after Thatcher’s election, culminating in Corton-wood and the 1984 strike. Crick provides a clear account of the issues involved and the shifting balance of forces, and also helps illuminate the distinctiveness of the Nottinghamshire coalfield. High earnings from the production bonus scheme, secure employment ...”

“... Mazzetti, then a student at the Slade, made a film called Together, with her fellow artists Michael Andrews and Eduardo Paolozzi playing the main parts. She shot it in the bombed-out East End, which gaggles of children had made their territory; her camera catches the wild scrambling, dash and hurtle of scores of boys and girls playing together in the ...”

“... species which contain indican, the precursor of the dye, are steeped in a vat. Lime (or urine, or wood ash water – something to keep the contents alkaline) is added. Fermentation turns indican into indoxyl. Cloth can be dyed directly in the fermentation vat, in which case the indoxyl is oxidised to become indigo when the steeped cloth is exposed to the ...”

“... barely five pages into one of the great openings in the modern novel. Invisible Man is, as James Wood has recently written, a negative Bildungsroman in which the protagonist imitates and rejects one identity after another. In spite of Ellison’s non-fictional celebration of the American Negro past, Invisible Man is his declaration of independence from all ...”

“... it was a left hook which put him away after 93 seconds (two seconds more than it took to deal with Michael Spinks last year). The Guardian reporter said the critical punch sounded ‘like an axe going into wet wood’. On TV it looked less impressive. Besides, Mailer used that image to describe the death of Benny Paret in ...”

“... project of a senior officer, refused to put in overtime in the laboratories, preferring to chop wood. His inevitable transfer to a lower circle of the Gulag empire was almost welcomed as another stage in his education: the hard rocky bottom that felt firm to his feet. Like his peasant hero, Ivan Denisovich, he found a meaning in hard physical work, yet ...”

“... One family tree is very like another, and it doesn’t take many of them to stop you seeing the wood. Furthermore, when Kuper zooms in for a closer look, he selects areas already well investigated. If you’ve read David Newsome, Annan himself, Michael Holroyd and Hermione Lee on the Wilberforces, Leslie Stephen, Lytton ...”

“... Eavan Boland writes, ‘the attack of his syntax, his brat-pack stance as poète maudit.’ Michael Longley ‘felt overwhelmed and wanted to withdraw to a safe distance’. It was obvious that, as a young poet, he dominated the university scene. It was not so obvious that the university would dominate him. Of the Northern Irish poets who emerged in the ...”