“... blur: I have no words. Grief is an orchestra. He has no hope. All lovelessness is bitter. A day will come. I do admire your purpose. When I am killed, you may not fail to want me.However desperate the longing, these full-stopped lines have the numb feeling of words no sooner said than repeated ad nauseam, like passionate love songs heard echoing from a ...”

“... in Hertfordshire, ‘perhaps the single most successful industry that continues to the present day is that of film-making.’ Elstree Studios in Borehamwood were founded in 1914, and eighty years later Warner Brothers opened studios on the site of the former Leavesden aerodrome at Abbots Langley – they’re now home to Harry Potter World. How can knobbly ...”

“... mourners gather: from brave wife to Neanderthal uncle-in-law, from plain-speaking Cousin Essie to Barry Shuskin the cryonics bore. Cryonics: that is the tip-off. In one view of the world, Henry might die and go to heaven. In Barry Shuskin’s view of the world, Henry might ‘die’, spend a purgatorial period in an ...”

“... And, even more important, there is no overt politicking on 9/11, the holiest of Holy Days, a day for strictly non-partisan pieties. That Mitt acted rashly – and got most of the facts wrong – flunked the ‘potential presidential crisis management’ test (a.k.a. the ‘3 a.m. phone call’) and was a further demonstration of his diplomatic ...”

“... Musicians were said to like it because the walls were thick: Caruso, Toscanini, Stravinsky. Later Barry Manilow played piano in the basement (no wall thick enough). The building is beautifully described by Bellow in Seize the Day. The Chelsea makes many more star appearances, but it’s the denizens of the place, their ...”

“... who followed academic precepts, often slavishly but sometimes imaginatively (Reynolds, Wilson, Barry and West), and those whose paintings were, in important ways, anti-academic, or ‘English’: Hogarth himself, Zoffany, Wright of Derby, Stubbs, Gainsborough, Rowlandson and Blake. The second group all shared something of Hogarth’s anti-authoritarian ...”

“... outclassing the dismal and anonymous contributions from modern British sculptors – where’s Barry Flanagan when you need him? Jake and Dinos Chapman? Antony Gormley RA? But as I moved around Room 1, which contains perhaps the most far-flung group of human figures ever gathered in close proximity, quite different features of bronze became apparent: its ...”

“... Torrance, Lee Harwood, Andrew Crozier, Peter Riley, J.H. Prynne, Michael Haslam, Douglas Oliver, Barry MacSweeney, Denise Riley – they must nonetheless wonder, from time to time, whether theirs is a case of having missed the boat which would only have been worth catching if they’d been on it in the first place. Perhaps that is why Sinclair gives the ...”

“... practical implications. Strawson’s sceptic doubts only for ‘methodological’ reasons, while Barry Stroud agrees with Descartes that Scepticism is appropriate only ‘in the philosophical investigation of human knowledge and not in everyday life’. Irrelevant to life and, except perhaps for a few Early Modern thinkers, not actually followed by ...”

“... young, the title for a brand new Philip Larkin poem is liable to enter your head at least once a day. This morning it was ‘Order of Service’. It’s not as good as ‘High Windows’ or ‘Dockery and Son’, but it has the same doleful ebb. Searching in an old folder, I found an order of service for Larkin’s memorial at Westminster Abbey on 14 ...”

“... had not Stoney locked her ‘in a cupboard in just her underwear … allowing her only an egg a day for sustenance’ – and he had run through most of his inheritance. In December 1776, Stoney arranged for salacious items to appear anonymously in the press, accusing the countess of ‘cold indifference’ to her late husband’s death, of forsaking her ...”

“... in other words. This ‘very coiledup’ and solitary boy was made to sit through every single day of the court hearings. His father was accused of plying a 15-year-old boy with cognac, fondling him and giving him five dollars as he let him go. Other 15-year-olds brought similar charges, but Goetz senior fought in the courts for over three years and ...”

“... That they met at St Martin’s School of Art at a time when Anthony Caro was teaching there and Barry Flanagan a fellow student? That George was once married and has children? A few years back, when gay activists were outing closeted gays, an enterprising journalist decided to ‘in’ George and put it about that he lived in the suburbs with a normal ...”

“... read on the same night. So did Lew Welch, who disappeared years later in the Sierra Nevada. Barry Miles, who has written the introductory essay in the catalogue for the Centre Pompidou’s exhibition Beat Generation (until 3 October), identifies the reading as the movement’s ‘birth certificate’: the following ...”

“... Martins who changed, even further, the concept of what sculpture might be. Among such artists were Barry Flanagan, Richard Long, Bruce McLean, Gilbert and George and others. Many of these people disliked each other. While their individual careers developed they found that they could not teach in the same studios. By the early Seventies this wonderful ...”