“... like Cooper by the wonderful Kyle McLachlan), hooked by the snipped-off human ear he finds in a field, exemplifies this curiosity which, in fiction, so often impels the innocent to look into the criminal underworld. His nice blonde girlfriend Sandy wishes he wouldn’t, but, as he says, ‘I’m seeing something that was always hidden. I’m involved in a ...”

“... of these benefits Gawain faithfully confers on the lord, embracing him when he returns from the field. The blend of brutal hunt and subtle seduction is described with extraordinary power and delicacy. Gawain remembers his vow of chastity but, against his will, accepts the lady’s present: a magic girdle which will protect him when the Green Knight ...”

“... the most famous and impressive was the lighting of the entirety of the spiral-ramped rotunda of Frank Lloyd Wright’s Guggenheim Museum – daylight was not excluded as it is at the Hayward.) On one level, Flavin’s installations are exercises in simple geometry. The possible configurations of standard tubes and colours – even those of plain white ones ...”

“... when Boswell pays an early visit to Bolt Court and Johnson barks ‘briskly’ from his bed: ‘Frank, go and get coffee and let us breakfast in splendour.’ And he is there late at night, when Boswell is too tired and tanked-up and talked-out to go back to his lodgings, and is settled into the spare room ‘by honest Francis with a most civil ...”

“... project for the Standard Oil Company of New Jersey. The need to adapt the material gathered in the field to the needs of the picture magazines ‘mandated a new graphic rhetoric. Familiar documentary elements were used in the Thirties to create realistic, yet visually appealing images ... formal complexity as well as radical content was suppressed in the ...”

“... she rang to ask: ‘Do you agree with Stephen Hawking?’ That’s usually an easy question to field. On topics ranging from the behaviour of black holes to the structure of the early universe, a safe answer is yes. But that wasn’t what my mother wanted to know. She wanted to know whether I agreed with the recently retired Lucasian Professor of ...”

“... This partiality, however qualified, is surprising in an author who surveys the rest of his immense field with such independence of judgment. Nothing escapes his interest: achievements and failures in economics, philosophy, anthropology, history, literature, are knowledgeably and briskly surveyed. There are inevitably some off-the-cuff judgments that provoke ...”

“... to Tommy for the next few days. Then one lunchtime I spotted him on the edge of the South Playing Field practising his football . . . I went over and sat down on the grass behind him, putting my back against a fence post. This couldn’t have been long after that time I’d shown him Patricia C’s calendar and he’d marched off, because I remember we ...”

“... SHALLOW: O, Sir John, do you remember since we lay all night in the Windmill in Saint George’s Field? SIR JOHN: No more of that, good Master Shallow, no more of that. SHALLOW: Ha, ’twas a merry night! And is Jane Nightwork alive? SIR JOHN: She lives, Master Shallow. The italicised words, found in the Folio, are not in the Quarto of Henry ...”

“... at the top of their power. They stood for pain. The stone on my other side was in memory of ‘Frank Cyril Nicholson, who died January 13th 1897, aged 14 years’. It was a cool day, very quiet at times, then some horn or deep engine on the dual carriageway would break in. Frank Cyril died after 14 years; died, it ...”

“... music and painting with mathematics, economics and philosophy, the person you end up with is Frank Plumpton Ramsey. A fellow of King’s College, Cambridge, Ramsey was born in 1903 and died before he turned 27, having done extraordinary work in all three fields. He is revered by academics, his influence evinced by the almost comical range of ideas named ...”

“... Born in Hungary, Cordell had arrived in Britain after the war with her husband, the composer Frank Cordell, and soon became part of the London scene. She was the only female painter in the Independent Group, a band of artists, architects and designers who hung out at the Institute of Contemporary Arts on Dover Street. She made her name in the ...”

“... that may be modernised, possibly with some help from secular literary criticism. In that field, books which may, by analogy, be called canonical, are given special sorts of attention. The whole idea of literary canons, undogmatic though it must be, is at present under attack by those who regard it as arbitrary or authoritarian, and wish to end the ...”

“... There were and there remain two extremes of opinion about Field Marshal Viscount Montgomery of Alamein, as well as a large number of intermediate positions. At one end of the scale are those who judge him a competent if somewhat pedestrian professional soldier who usually managed by good fortune to decline battle unless the odds were overwhelmingly in his favour, a general apt to forfeit the fruits of victory by excessive caution; an unimaginative commander with a very inflated view of his own talents and achievements, who was as conceited as he was uncharitable; an ill-mannered egocentric with a strong streak of unkindness ...”

“... Editions, an imprint O’Brien set up in order to get out his own work and that of his friend Frank Kuenstler; no one else was interested in publishing it. Kuenstler, an experimental film-maker as well as a poet, was a significant influence: he seems to have encouraged the cinematic qualities in O’Brien’s poetry. Kuenstler’s short film El Atlantis ...”