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“... own house and a son at boarding school. I don’t know why I expected anything of her, I hadn’t read The Golden Notebook, or any of the other books about women who actually lived lives. I sensed her confidence and sophistication. She exuded calm as we sipped the soup, though it turned out she felt nothing of the sort, as why should she, opening the door to ...”

“... must, we are privileged to, draw on a more complex, and constantly changing, language. It must be read in the details. Halle’s statistical tables do not stop him presenting anecdotal evidence, or showing photographs of the rooms he discusses. He begins his book with an account of a telling failure: One evening, I knocked on the door of a Manhattan ...”

“... of the picture plane, to reject any hint of implied space. Another reason Hodgkin’s pictures read as views is the frames. Not just the actual picture frames which are often painted and thus part of the work, but framing bands of colour within that frame (the green border in In Raimund Stecker’s Garden, for example, the brown one in Italy). You look out ...”

“... and tails off in unfelt correctness). If, in these Japanese paintings and prints, we could read the calligraphy, differentiate the faces, interpret signals of social class in costume (it would take a long time to absorb the information in the admirably full catalogue notes), we would no longer see them as timeless and beyond fashion, a false notion ...”

“... in fancy borders which are stuck below some of the pictures, all these help fill out what can be read from the paintings themselves: that Reynolds, in his seven-hours-a-day, seven-days-a-week pursuit of reputation, fame and wealth, and in his ardent prosecution of his role as a maker of iconic portraits, not only made likenesses of distinguished literary ...”

“... this legislation was of Maya Evans, arrested at the Cenotaph for not having received permission to read out the names of 97 British soldiers killed in Iraq. Haw’s protest slipped through a loophole: the Act was not retrospective and he continues his vigil. On 22 January he won a legal ruling that, in its present reduced state (an area three metres ...”

“... conviction in the potential of utopian abstraction to transform everyday life.’ But even if you read it as ‘two of the’, and accept the suggestion that their ‘collaborative way of working and direct involvement in local industries has influenced 20th-century fashion, media, theatre and cinema’, you would also want to say something about failed hopes ...”

“... a snatch of distant landscape from Ribera. In all of these the nature of the performance can be read from what the paint tells about the path of the brush. There was a long tradition of small landscape paintings made from nature, and the Barbizon painters also made fluent gestures with big brushes. Besides, every kind of painter produced studies and ...”

“... pattern alone. Although we must take care when making judgments about the look of texts we can’t read, there are pages here from two North African Korans of the eighth and 11th centuries in the geometric Kufic script which combine tremendous calligraphic energy with such perfect manual control that one is almost grateful for the ignorance that hides the ...”

“... which it is not easy to follow the geometry of the curved metal-clad surfaces. I am tempted to read the way the outer walls follow the acute angles of a Vauban bastion and the inner ‘silos’ (which house thematic displays) the twists of Great War trenches as a commentary on military engineering. But even the plan is really much closer to the abstract ...”

“... a V formation of 12 cylinders replaces the radial arrangement of earlier engines around it – read as analogous to simple Darwinian evolution. Fitter designs replace those which are less fit. When you look for the reasons underlying mutations that have changed the look of engines, you find a narrative of unexpected problems met and unexpected failures ...”

“... something from which a national school will grow, in his transcriptions of Old World scenery.I read Roderick Hudson on the train that took me down through France to the Auvergne, with a watercolour box and binoculars, the paraphernalia of two amateur pursuits likely to expose one to curiosity or mild derision, in my luggage. Bird watching, which is ...”

“... one sort of literary package. The Catcher in the Rye and Lucky Jim both seemed to have it when we read them in the Fifties, and it’s what makes song-writers sound like sages – Ian Dury has, appropriately, done a song to back the television credits for The Secret Diary. It is a quality which seems to be anti-authoritarian, but only because it notices how ...”

“... poets. ‘At the nights I run,’ one stage manager said to me, ‘you can ask if anyone wants to read, and you’ll get silence. Then after a few pros have had a go, you try again. It always turns out that about a third of the people there have got some sort of poem on their phone, though they’ve never showed it to anyone.’At lunchtime, the screen showed ...”

“... diapers of HSBC are hung out to catch the eye) and palimpsests (in Fleet Street you can still read ‘National Westminster’ on the granite, under the perkier ‘Natwest’). Badging is, of course, much cheaper and easier to apply than a deeper architectural identity. You can put a badge on any structure, and take it away painlessly, if expensively (the ...”