“... letters and her daughter’s diaries. In Point Counter Point Leonard Huxley is portrayed as Philip Quarles’s father, who in Chapter 20 is shown leaving the country for his literary work in London. He has an assignation with his ‘typist girl’ in town. ‘Brought up in an epoch when ladies apparently rolled along on wheels, Mr Quarles was peculiarly ...”

“... Cheney conceded, ‘but the most plentiful source of affordable energy in the country.’ Philip Clapp, president of the US National Environmental Trust, denounced Cheney’s plan as ‘an across-the-board attack on the environment’. Europeans began calling Bush the ‘Toxic Texan’. Scientists have all but unanimously condemned the new US ...”

“... that many of the same things are now being said about His Royal Highness Prince Charles Philip Arthur George. For while, in some ways, the British monarchy is constantly developing and evolving, in other respects it is remarkably consistent and unchanging, and one of its most unvarying features during the last three hundred years has been the ...”

“... Delaware seems really to be a neat updating of the past, an amiable new cousin for Lew Archer and Philip Marlowe. Binyon is impressed by Chandler, although he thinks Marlowe is a ‘romanticised and to a certain extent sentimentalised’ version of Dashiell Hammett’s Sam Spade; a little impatient with Macdonald, too cerebral and meaningful for his taste ...”

“... Pei’s 1002-foot-tall Texas Commerce Tower has an observation deck on the 60th floor, a good way short of the summit. From it you look down into the Deco crown of a nearby Twenties block, and across other rooftop areas not quite meant to be seen. The rest of Downtown clusters around, but its glamour is reduced and exposed. What strikes you more is the ...”

“... are those of the court dwarves – social distance perhaps removes anxiety. The miraculous short hand which turns the eyes into dark pits, lid and pupil hardly distinguishable, and which reads as a living glance, is not matched even in the most assured of the royal portraits. It seems there is a choice to be made. Vasari reports Michelangelo as saying ...”

“... experiments. But we had to wait for the end of the century. Robert Wilson, designer/director of Philip Glass’s Monsters of Grace, ‘a digital opera in three dimensions’ which has toured North America and Europe since it opened last year, says of this work: ‘I’m not giving you puzzles to solve, only pictures to hear.’ Some of the tales that Rée ...”

“... there must be an element of strangeness and exoticism in his work. You could call Saul Bellow, Philip Roth and Cynthia Ozick Jewish writers, but they are also American writers. Singer never attempts to present a Gentile sensibility; in this whole volume there are hardly any Gentiles and only one with more than a walk-on part. The stories fall into three ...”

“... vision. The present Oxford edition is to be followed by a new Cambridge edition, supervised by Philip Brockbank, and, it is rumoured, by a revised New Arden. For modern editors the issue of whether to modernise has been replaced, for reasons that are in part commercial and expedient, by the issue of how to modernise. Here Wells has many very valuable ...”

“... Shall I, to please anothers wine-sprung minde Lose all mine own? God hath giv’n me a measure Short of his [i.e. ‘another’s’] canne and body; must I find A pain in that, wherein he findes a pleasure? Misinterpreting ‘canne’ (=‘can’, i.e. measure or capacity) for ‘cane’, i.e. walking-stick, he uses the quotation to illustrate ...”

“... did affect the way that prominent men and women were described and commemorated. Those who praised Philip Sidney, Arundel and others for their ability to combine courage and sensibility, to pursue arms and letters, had read The Courtier – as had the objects of their praise. Burke follows Castiglione even into the hands of his enemies – the critics of ...”

“... the agrarian question. He may not have won active peasant support during his leadership of the short-lived Roman Republic, but he was at least successful in neutralising the influence of the reactionary clergy and in avoiding a counter-revolutionary uprising. Republican propaganda had considerable success in the small market towns around Rome; if the ...”

“... when we are considering who we are as people. In the movie Blade Runner, based on Philip K. Dick’s Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep?, androids begin to develop human emotions when they learn that they have a predetermined lifespan and, in the case of one android, Rachael, when she is programmed with memories of a childhood. Mortality and ...”

“... is better, in large part because her mind has continued to change, and so has her life. A short but expansive piece illustrative in miniature of the book’s wide-ranging interests moves from a postcard reproduction of Balthasar Denner’s 1721 painting Alte Frau to a touching remembrance of the late John Berger to a dual meditation on ageing ...”

“... makes him – so fatigued, thin-skinned and full of teenage chagrin – come alive on the page. Philip Larkin once described Sue in Jude the Obscure as ‘too irritating not to have been a real person’. (You see what he means: ‘I couldn’t bear to let you go – possibly to Arabella again – and so I got to love you, Jude.’) Nikolai’s jibes at his ...”