“... soft bigotry of low expectations’. ‘Bush’s conversational storytelling makes for engaging reading,’ Peter Baker writes in the New York Times. ‘It’s folksy, sharply observed and surprisingly affecting,’ Michiko Kakutani says in the same paper. ‘A helluva good read,’ Douglas Brinkley writes in the ...”

“... Elevation is dignified. The long wall leads your eye away. The wall behind the man in profile reading the newspaper holds him and stops the eye. Noticing, here, that the reflection is darker than the thing reflected, and the edge of the shadow inside the pot is sharper than the edge of the white wall above it, is the beginning of representing it. But ...”

“... as Father Brown.’ The other Alec (McCowen) has arrived at his state of grace after a year or two reading the Gospel of St Mark to hugely appreciative audiences in theatres rather than churches. In Personal Mark he writes about the life of Jesus, as seen through his own and St Mark’s eyes. He thinks that St Mark’s primary source was St ...”

“... us no comment of his own on the story he has to tell – just the facts: no speculation as to why Peter Sutcliffe behaved as he did, just the events, the family life, anecdotes that may or may not be pertinent, the pubs and their atmosphere. And we go back, or rather from the beginning of the book we go forward – from Sutcliffe’s grandparents on both ...”

“... well-worn counters. While the symbolism – names written in sand, on the wind, in water; the reading which destroys what is being read – are well-worn poetic images, the literal illegibility and real fragility of Leone and Macdonald’s pieces seem to have had a remarkable effect. Works of art like these offer experiences which bypass pure frustration ...”

“... of view’. That he possessed the first has occasionally been questioned. Admittedly, his copious reading may not have conformed to the orthodox procedures of scholarly research, but it is his grasp of a situation which gives remarkable coherence to his best work. As to his capacity for stating facts, even sceptics have to concede the triumph of Eminent ...”

“... to be condemned to hell for his sins. But this, it seems to me, is too severe and one-sided a reading of what may be the greatest scene in all opera – the scene in which the statue comes to supper with the Don and invites him to accompany him to the nether world. Chilled to the bone by the touch of the statue’s hand, the Don is vanquished by ...”

“... made no sense at all of his injuries. The man died, I believe, and that was the end of it. After reading Oyster I remembered this and wondered whether any account of the man’s fate reached his friends or family, if he had any. Oyster is about the strangers and drifters who turn up in such outback places and people them. Outer Maroo is delineated by real ...”

“... painted that picture in Milan, Vilhelm Hammershøi, in Copenhagen, painted a picture called Woman Reading in Sunlight, Strandgade 30. The room where she sits, with her back to you, was in Hammershøi’s apartment. The sun shines through the fabric of looped-back curtains. The bright patches of light on the floor are shaped by the window she faces. These more ...”

“... in architectural dress overcomes more flamboyant detail. A modern flush door can seem, on this reading, an evolutionary end point. Whether they’re emphatic or discreet, it would be odd if the doors of houses weren’t built on a human scale. Cathedral doors, even some church doors, can take up a substantial part of an end wall. When there is no ...”

“... the ghouls in a horror movie, are now less a real fear than a safe thrill. Contrast those with a reading of Moctezuma’s coronation stone. It is a rectangular slab of basalt, carved in low relief on all six sides. In the exhibition it stands on its side; originally it was probably laid flat on the ground, so the rabbit with improbably large Bugs Bunny teeth ...”

“... dozed off. Not many of the little screens that give blurred versions of movies were lit up. Few reading lights were on. I remember making this journey at other times and looking at the Himalayas and the red Australian desert or, when taking the western route, at the Canadian tundra and the Hoover dam. Try to look at the view now, I thought, and the ward ...”

“... arch, careless, spirited, elegant, and engaging’ – are a reminder of how foreign the idea of reading a portrait as one would a character description in a work of fiction has become to us. The fiction Lawrence’s pictures bring to mind is of an indulgent, romantic kind. Thinking about the Lawrence portraits I had a look at some of Georgette Heyer’s ...”

“... UPVC glazing bars. It used to seem to me that terraced houses were infinitely adaptable. But after reading Rasmussen I came to believe that the changes from dwelling house to publishing house or lawyer’s chambers were no greater than the social and structural ones that came when a big house in Central London was turned first into flats and then ...”

“... the flâneur’s disengaged observation of the city’s unfathomable complexity. At the time I was reading The Delirious Museum I took a Saturday walk in Paris from the Musée Carnavalet, which stands in the narrow streets of the Marais, to the Musée d’Orsay, grand enough in itself and made grander by its position, across the river from the Tuileries and ...”