“... might well have been some roadman who had just helped the larger out of a drain – which is very close to the note of Katherine Mansfield’s comic deflations of the masculine order, such as the occasion when she feels faint at an exhibition of Naval photographs in 1918 and is assisted by ‘two Waacs and a Wren’: They asked me ... whether I had lost ...”

“... which they liked and which they wanted taken out. She presented them to a wider crowd at Frank Zappa’s birthday party at the Mudd Club in 1979, the year after she moved to a windowless loft in the Bowery in New York. A DJ boyfriend started to spin songs to play over the slides, then she developed a playlist herself. The soundtrack to The Ballad of ...”

“... Barker describes a peculiarly irritating ‘Clicking Colonel’ in Whitehall who ‘came really close to the caricature so beloved of those who distrust and lampoon the Military’. Well, I can only suggest that Mr Barker read Alan Judd’s novel if he wishes to discover what makes such a Colonel click – for outside of Evelyn Waugh I know of no caricature ...”

“... of the Universe’), who ‘liked beginnings and endings’ and perhaps has read Edward Said and Frank Kermode. And in this He is also in the image of His maker, for Malamud’s book has its own academic accoutrements, including a Preface which (like that of any learned monograph) acknowledges the Center for Advanced Study in the Behavioral Sciences for ...”

“... on our hanging onto stories in our heads, being ready for their return – the effect is about as close to simultaneity, or a split-screen, as one could get on pages that run in lines and have to be turned over one after another. But the tour de force, and the reader’s induction to this method, is the prologue. It recounts the famous baseball game of ...”

“... Households, the new American data turn out to be very similar. The new data for Britain, also, are close to the American ones. A disturbing aspect of both new surveys is their single-minded and reiterated claim that ‘the choices we make about our sex lives are dramatically affected by our social circumstances.’ Surely they are also influenced biologically ...”

“... with a million million million million million times the power of a human mind’. And Frank Tipler’s The Physics of Immortality, possibly the book nearest in flavour to Dyson’s, goes so far as to predict a system with infinite computing power. Again, why is Dyson so confident that spreading through their galaxy will make humans too far apart ...”

“... a secret hand movement the Dönmeh used. He then told us of an explosive rumour that seems to lie close to the surface in modern Turkey, namely, that Kemal Atatürk was a Dönmeh. A few days later, we were in Jerusalem at Gershom Scholem’s 70th-birthday party. When I told him what had happened at my lunch he said he didn’t know any of the people but one ...”

“... the appropriate Galenic text. That tradition – or much of it – has been revived in books by Frank Gonzalez-Crussi, a professor of pathology in the Children’s Memorial Hospital at Northwestern University, who has created a subgenre of his own: portrayals of the usual and the monstrous drawn from his own professional life, with a bookish veneer that ...”

“... its use of brickwork to such canonical Modernist buildings as Dudok’s project at Hilversum and Frank Lloyd Wright’s Hollyhock House.It was this Modernist aspect of Scott’s architecture that made possible de Meuron and Herzog’s own neo-Modernist or, better, ‘post-Minimalist’ adaptation of his building, essentially by stacking a set of boxes in the ...”

“... the Irish and US governments revealed deepening divisions. In Washington to seek military support, Frank Aiken, de Valera’s defence secretary, asked Roosevelt if he was free to say that the US backed Ireland’s stand against foreign aggression. When Roosevelt specified German aggression, Aiken replied: ‘Or British.’ Roosevelt snapped: it was ‘absurd ...”

“... on overkill, as if Foster wanted to outdo the tomes produced for more notorious peers such as Frank Gehry and Rem Koolhaas, whose offices seem like cottage industries in comparison with his. For Foster is also ‘Foster and Partners’, a practice of more than six hundred people with projects in fifty countries. There are six large design groups, each ...”

“... of ‘casualties’ and ‘victims’. She describes obesity researchers as ‘heroes’. That Frank Shuttlesmith from Des Moines, 48 years old and with generations of comfortable forebears stretching out behind him, is a noble victim of a fearful global epidemic because he’s thick around the middle, doesn’t care to walk and enjoys extra cheese on his ...”

“... tenements in which he grew up, with their high ceilings, bay windows and brightly tiled wally close (central stairwell).The school’s headmaster, Francis Newbery, was also an influence on the eventual design. His teaching methods emphasised that ‘students should be individualised as well as classified … the personality of the student should not be ...”

“... the quest of her final book.) What other things made up Fitzgerald’s ‘burden’? Well, Frank Kermode was right early on, in this paper (22 November 1979), when he noticed the fascination with water, in its many forms and depredations: damp, flood, rain, drowning, ‘the dead man’s stench of river water’, the ‘long-awaited torrents’ that ...”