“... 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 ...”

“... as if they were real, and it is hard not to be grateful when the real personality goes even a short way towards matching up with the fictional one. Carole Lombard was a scatological delight in real life. Clark Gable adored her foul tongue, and when we dote on one of her studio portraits and imagine that lush mouth saying a dirty word we would need to be ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... effectively end their study with South Africa’s exit from the Commonwealth, adding only a short epilogue to bring the story up to its 1994 re-entry. Their frontispiece shows Nelson Mandela on his 2001 visit to Hyam’s Cambridge college, when he talked happily of the ‘unbreakable bonds’ between the two countries. While they certainly show that a ...”

“... a steady income for himself and his heirs. He was never above suing: in 1604 he took his neighbour Philip Rogers to court for a debt of 35 shillings and ten pence. When a group of local notables sought late in his life to enclose common land near Stratford, he prudently did not interfere, once he had satisfied himself that his income from tithes was safe. The ...”

“... up of the trust of two of her grand-daughters, one of whom was married to Thomas Wharton, son of Philip, Baron Wharton, the Nonconformists’ champion in the House of Lords and John Owen’s patron. Her son, the poet Rochester, was a supporter of Buckingham, was listed by Shaftesbury as ‘worthy’, and despite repeated bouts of severe illness served on 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 ...”

“... mind after a former lady-in-waiting to the tsarina visited the asylum and said that Anna was too short to be Tatiana. But her supporters refused to give up on the idea of her being one of the grand duchesses. Because she wouldn’t speak, they gave her a list of the girls’ names, asking her to cross out the ones that were not hers. She crossed out all ...”

“... and interpretations’, and the crazy-enough-to-be-true projections of Thomas Pynchon, Philip K. Dick, William Burroughs and J.G. Ballard (who wrote incisively about Surrealism). The afterlife of Surrealism is more active in poetry, as in the New York School of Frank O’Hara, John Ashbery and others: ‘We all “grew up Surrealist”,’ Ashbery ...”

“... period of the 20th century. In the years between 1945 and 1960, personal income almost tripled. Philip Roth called it the greatest moment of ‘collective inebriation in American history’. After the Great Depression and two world wars, the middle classes were beginning to live America’s dream of prosperity; the less fortunate didn’t yet seem to be ...”

“... lesson came from the work of other living poets who used form. Tim introduced me to the poetry of Philip Larkin, whom again, ignorant economist that I was, I only knew as the compiler of The Oxford Book of Twentieth-Century English Verse. But as I read Larkin (whose poem beginning, ‘The trees are coming into leaf/Like something almost being said,’ has a ...”

“... proclaims the contrary. So does the concluding line – ‘Never such innocence again’ – of Philip Larkin’s 1960 poem ‘MCMXIV’, invoking the summer haze, the ‘dark-haired children at play’, the      moustached archaic faces Grinning as if it were all An August Bank Holiday lark ... of the war’s early days. No one thought it would be a ...”

“... seven more children on her, Elfriede Jelinek, Austria’s Nobel Prize winning novelist, posted a short essay on her website under the title ‘Im Verlassenen’. It begins: ‘Austria is a small world in which the big world holds its rehearsal. The performance takes place in the very much smaller cellar dungeon in Amstetten – daily, nightly. No performance ...”

“... once met an Englishman. He was in a good grey flannel suit, the flannel also covering his face. Short of indicating a prudent change of tailor, the incident (if dreams have incidents) serves to point up the temptation to English Kafka and joke him down to size. The Channel is a slipper bath of irony through which we pass these serious Continentals in order ...”