“... in a drawer and who lived his paltry life ‘under a bell-jar – or a thimble – in a very small dark’. The accompanying story concludes with the ironic exchange (about a very unlovely father, with some ugly secrets): ‘Bring him back! ... Better not.’ The dedicatee of Life Stories is Rebecca West. When one recalls how affectionately she brought ...”

“... few South Africans who have seen the struggle all the way through: Wentzel properly belongs to a small group with Mandela, Sisulu and a handful of others. As a female fighter against apartheid she has a longer record than Helen Suzman or Winnie Mandela. In a South Africa where that sort of record counts terribly, she has ...”

“... since the early 1950s. Retailing at anything from a few hundred to a few thousand dollars for a small vial, different versions of this indispensable elixir are hawked by laboratory supply companies the world over. Many of these products’ consumers have long been aware that there is a human story behind HeLa’s blandly commercialised ubiquity; now Rebecca ...”

“... former beatniks, post-situs and surrealists, second-hand book-dealers, pulp fanzine editors and small-press poets, refugees and survivors from the many literary-artistic ‘scenes’ of London’s recent – that is, post-Sixties – subterranean past. This, roughly, is the environment out of which Iain Sinclair’s writing comes. Before he moved into ...”

“... along the street by the breeze. It is often difficult to distinguish whether what you hear is a small noise close by (even indoors) or a greater noise a long way off; and the sound of bombs can be very deceptive.Eliot here seems to be pulling gently on the silken ties of the words, images, constellations that they knew to hold in place their love, even if ...”

“... commentary on some of his paintings from 1991 – introduced with the warning that ‘the small gap between the explanation of a picture and a picture itself provides the only possible perspective on painting,’ and tellingly titled ‘Disenchantment’ – Tuymans has explained that the source for this image was wrapping paper from the DDR, which ...”

“... a professional photographer. His head had been turned by Cartier-Bresson’s 1954 image of a small boy hefting two large wine bottles, which he spotted in the pages of Paris Match. For a while, Killip pursued a career on strict 1960s Bailey-Blowup lines: he moved to London as assistant to Justin de Villeneuve, Twiggy’s manager (and formerly a Mayfair ...”

“... inference by adding, with a nod to sanity: ‘If design govern in a thing so small.’ Now what is Meyers’s ‘new reading’ of this sonnet, which he regards as Frost’s ‘greatest poem’? Meyers’s observations are tediously un-new (drawing as they do on Randall Jarrell and Lionel Trilling); but he adds one triumphant new ...”

“... for it with Hera and Aphrodite, and before too long Paris, their adjudicator, will be seducing Helen and Agamemnon will be sacrificing his daughter to secure a favourable wind for Troy. There will follow long accounts of battles and heroic deeds, perhaps something on the untimely death of Thetis’ son, Achilles, Odysseus’ victory in the dispute over his ...”

“... people whom he could move around ‘like God’. Eudora Welty’s people live mostly in, or near, small free-floating towns like Morgana, with its water tank and courthouse and its ‘Confederate soldier on a shaft’ that resembles ‘a chewed-on candle, as if old gnashing teeth had made him’. They go their own ways and are not haunted by history. You can ...”

“... in 1938, accompanied by other alcoholic tramps, including a well-educated and musical woman called Helen and a weak, grey-haired man called Rudy, who claims to be half-Cherokee – but Francis, who bullies Rudy in a protective way, tells him his mother was only a Mex: ‘That’s why you got them high cheekbones. Indian I don’t buy.’ William Kennedy tells ...”

“... called her ‘the most celebrated of the young American women painters’. Joan Mitchell, Helen Frankenthaler and Grace Hartigan at the opening of Frankenthaler’s solo exhibition at Tibor de Nagy Gallery, New York (1957) That spring day in 1960, Hartigan knew that Price’s star was also on the rise; a very young associate professor of ...”

“... at his preparatory school writing on a classroom noticeboard ‘I REBEL’. Lambert quotes Helen Mirren as saying that ‘conservatism was the flip side of Lindsay the rebel – and for a rebel, conservatism becomes an act of rebellion.’ That’s a neat way to resolve the contradiction, but why resolve it at all? A highly polished product of a system ...”

“... are matched by language that is (as the title of one poem has it) ‘spezzato’, broken into small bits. ‘Tu ti spezzasti,’ ‘You broke yourself into pieces,’ says Ungaretti. A former way of life is being renounced in a string of ‘nevers’ that forecast Never itself: All the rest I swear given back whole. Never again empowered. Never again a ...”

“... of a pair of knickers. At the time – 1945 – Walton was in his late twenties, and was running a small department store in Newport, Arkansas belonging to a franchise called Ben Franklin. Walton had grown up in Missouri and attended the state university, then gone on to a clerical job during the war. He married ...”