“... lives in the woods. Floyd tells Webster he did it because he was drunk: ‘You see, I was mighty close to them dawgs, an’ that li’l one were my fav’rit. Sadie were a real stylish dawg. I jes don’t know rightly what it was, how I could come to doin it. But I sure’n hell did it.’ He says he could kill a man sober, eyeing his ...”

“... they are construction workers, possibly Polish, saving their wages and choosing to kip down close to where the action is. The tsunami of speculative capital, wanton destruction, hole digging; the throwing up of apartment blocks, dormitory hives, warehouse conversions along the murky waterways. A new development calling itself Adelaide Wharf, and ...”

“... metal bunk beds riveted to the wall, with a small table and two stools opposite, and a metal sink close to the small window, high in the wall across from the door, and a toilet on the other side of a small partition. The idea of what it might be like to be here all day and night, cooped up with another person, was fully palpable.The jail was temporarily open ...”

“... historian Bernhard Schwertfeger called in 1929 ‘the world war of the documents’. Renouvin was close to Raymond Poincaré, president of France between 1913 and 1920 and prime minister intermittently during the 1920s. After the cessation of hostilities, Poincaré’s record in office came under hostile scrutiny from French historians, most of them men of ...”

“... knowledge of his subsequent work.It has often been argued by hostile commentators – among them, Frank Lentricchia – that deconstruction is just a species of ‘textualist’ mystification, a last-ditch retreat from politics and history into the realm of evasive rhetorical strategies. Now this charge has a certain plausibility when applied to those early ...”

“... a sort of Shakespearian lack of differentiation. Yet at the same time it is a mystique which lies close to the heart of Kipling’s method, and gives it that unique reality/unreality blend which is so hypnotically effective. Kipling’s method makes details of living larger than life, and memorable for that reason, but at the same time its emphasis ...”

“... group in a medium shot. By the time the bride has been called ‘voluptuous’, we are somehow close enough to see her eyelashes. On Fisher’s reading, the shift occurs because Whitman, as narrator, in stealth has supplanted the bridegroom and is inviting the reader to join him. But this need not follow if one supposes that the eye of the mind has a more ...”

“... the decade after she had achieved publication, problems remained. In a letter written to her close friend Bob Smith (who published the first appreciative essay on her novels) Barbara Pym lightly passes on the information from Cape that ‘8 Americans and 10 Continental publishers saw and “declined” ... Excellent Women and they are still plodding on ...”

“... before Dürer died, Lorck drew a severe portrait of his great predecessor. He emulated Dürer’s close scrutiny of his subjects, but he also had a quirky, even comic imagination and a taste for odd juxtapositions and discrepancies of scale. In a superb sketch in chalk on blue paper, held in the prints and drawings collection of the British Museum, a large ...”

“... in his presence as a ‘black bastard’. Harmondsworth is a ‘fast track’ centre, conveniently close to Heathrow: 99.6 per cent of the asylum claims considered there are rejected. The young man I spoke to believes – and he may well be right – that the high turnover ensures a profit for the private company that runs Harmondsworth. The company, United ...”

“... sexual fantasies about his sister cover many pages of the novel. His chosen way of feeling close to her is to imagine and simulate her sexual pleasure, to let himself be penetrated by a succession of rent boys and casual male lovers. When young men are not around, he can impale himself on a smooth tree branch or – in one revolting scene – a sausage ...”

“... of the windows were dark and a notion of privacy seemed embedded in the stone. It must have been close to half past ten, because there was a sudden burst of fireworks over Edinburgh Castle – a nightly feast in August as the military tattoo concludes its parade. In his boyhood, Robert Louis Stevenson would sometimes be surprised while walking in the New ...”

“... pleasure, or perhaps to discover whether he would enjoy it, he bent over and brought his vile face close to the face of the judge’s wife and kissed her mouth.Ana returned to life, overcome by nausea … For she thought that she had felt on her lips the cold and slimy belly of a toad.The end!What do these four examples have in common? In all of them, the gay ...”

“... Moore, Ceri Richards, William Roberts, Josef Herman, David Bomberg, L.S. Lowry, George Fullard and Frank Auerbach, together with the Dutchman Friso ten Holt. Of these, only the enthusiastic review of Lowry is included in the new collection, which is overwhelmingly dominated by French-based artists.Francis Bacon, whose work Berger reviewed in the New Statesman ...”

“... not to find himself mentioned, nevertheless recognised something ‘truly masterly’; and Frank Kermode wrote that Ellmann’s account would ‘fix Joyce’s image for a generation’, a judgment that, as Zachary Leader rightly comments, was if anything an underestimate. Leader, himself the distinguished biographer of Kingsley Amis and Saul ...”