“... in a uniform; what Henry Kissinger used to call (referring demurely to himself) ‘the man on the white horse’? For the Spencer girl, I carry an even sharper blade in my heart. All that rehearsal and all that pre-publicity, with the publicity getting publicity, and then – nada. She revealed that she had been miserable to the point of puking. She disclosed ...”

“... evolved ‘from ... pictures with titles like... Where the Thrushes Sing... to a Ben Nicholson white relief’. This was not the only drama to hit the 7&5, as it became, paring its name down to go with the work. As Wood left the scene Barbara Hep-worth made her entrance. She had come second in the competition for the Rome scholarship and married the man ...”

“... Lord Byron’), ‘Paul’s Tattoo’ (alluding to ‘Tattoos’ in James Merrill’s sequence ‘Peter’), ‘An Island Sheaf’ (alluding to Hart Crane’s Key West: An Island Sheaf), ‘Summer Landscape’, ‘Lily and Bronze’, ‘After the Fourth’, ‘American Sublime’ (alluding to Stevens’s ‘The American Sublime’). Even Doty’s cleverest ...”

“... right enemies (and not find himself finessed so that he’s lined up with Sewell – or the late Peter Fuller) and stay out on the left flank; his fury is rather Victorian – Ruskin’s rage against the immoralism of the Baroque. Oddly enough, Matthew Collings – in the book of his Channel Four series – says many of the same things as Stallabrass; he ...”

“... personal adventures and escapes’ – the very things which, for good or evil, Evelyn Waugh and Peter Fleming and Robert Byron, not to mention Redmond O’Hanlon, assume to be the heart of travel writing. This leads us to the reflection that travel writing, or anyway the best sort, only pretends to be informative. The author, out of self-respect, and by ...”

“... may be one thing, but a writer like Pierre Guyotat is hardly in need of ‘appropriation’ by a white Jewish writer from New York. Too often, her novels were a barrage of attacks on writerly skills she lacked. Her extravagant self-presentation often worked against her too. Attacking capitalism while dressed in Valentino can look like absurdist theatre. But ...”

“... scandalous … He has made a will leaving them to me plus £500.’ In the end they were left to Peter Coats, Channon’s boyfriend of many years, who allowed the publication in 1967 of a drastically abbreviated and expurgated edition, incompetently edited by Robert Rhodes James, which was greeted with widespread ridicule and contemptuous comparison with ...”

“... Blakey is a better fit. B. is solicitous if not saintly around my mother. Helps her fold up her white metal cane from the Braille Institute and calls her ‘Mavis’ in a polite, Boston-bred, upper-middle-class-lesbian-daughter-in-law way – much as Mary Cheney’s lover, one imagines, addresses her in-laws as ‘Dick’ and ‘Lynne’. B. played squash ...”

“... post-feminist or anti-feminist film, or just in some baffling way French. In the Guardian, Peter Bradshaw went for ‘provocative’, before deciding it was a ‘startlingly strange rape-revenge black comedy’. I didn’t think it was as strange as all that and I did think it was funny, but what really struck me was that every woman I knew who had ...”

“... or at least has done since 1913 – Bordwell offers us an illustration from a film called Red and White Roses, released in that year. Of course, not even Bazin was arguing that montage was all bad, or that films could or should abandon it entirely, and the idea that film history consists of battles between the two approaches is as rigid and unhandy as the ...”

“... later, Freud cut the Spender poems out of the book, ‘deeming them superfluous’.) Peter Watson, who funded Horizon, also began to enjoy Freud’s company. ‘He helped me very much, looked at my pictures and bought things and gave me money and books,’ Freud said. ‘He had pictures that I liked and learned from, very good things … He had a ...”

“... the inner cage and the Professor could, by creeping a little nearer, have witnessed what no white man had ever seen: half-dance, half-drama, the first work of art created by a species less than man … He found he had, in unscientific compunction, averted his eyes.What happens after the heist is pure soap opera. Search parties trawl the zoo looking for ...”

“... it might be a clothesline, ‘old and dark grey’: ‘It had burst open and was giving up its white pith.’ Or it might be a locker room, where ‘hair pieces like Skye terriers waited for their masters’; or a courtroom, where a lawyer called Cannibal Pinsker has ‘a large yellow cravat that lay on his shirt like a cheese omelette’; or an old ...”

“... surface. Black daisies absorb heat so they thrive in these low temperatures. But there are mutant white daisies which reflect heat and, as the temperature rises even further, these begin to flourish. So Daisyworld is cooled by white daisies and warmed by black ones. A simple flower is able to regulate and stabilise the ...”

“... as are the arrows      Of that silver sphereWhose intense lamp narrows      In the white dawn clear,Until we hardly see, we feel that it is there.‘I should be grateful for any explanation of this stanza’, Eliot said.Until now I am still ignorant to what sphere Shelley refers, or why it should have silver arrows, or what the devil he means ...”