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“... all wearing the same sort of false moustache. They are called, we soon learn, Mr Blue, Mr Green, Mr Brown, Mr Grey – possibly not their real names, but a touch of criminal style Tarantino certainly borrowed for Reservoir Dogs. The caper in both films involves the hijacking of a New York subway train heading south into Manhattan from Pelham Bay ...”

“... scar. How can the celebrity outsider maintain a sense of his identity, or painterly authority, when he is his own subject-matter and his audience sees that subject-matter as ‘other’, less than ‘us’? Basquiat’s solutions to this dilemma are often brilliant. In the triptych Zydeco (1984), for example, a cinematographer in profile looks through the lens of his movie camera ...”

“... of high culture. An authorised biography has now appeared of an English dealer of recent memory, Robert Fraser, 1937-86. His chequered career, terminated by Aids, lasted as long as it did only because of subsidies from his parents and getting away with not paying his debts, while the world at large remembers him for pictures showing him in a police van ...”

“... stayed in an apartment overlooking the beach. ‘It is such a wonderful apartment,’ she wrote to Robert Lowell in 1958, that we’ll never rent it again, no matter what heights rents soar to, I think. Top floor, 11th, a terrace around two sides, overlooking all that famous bay and beach. Ships go by all the time, like targets in a shooting gallery, people ...”

“... the Fairy Queen, the Lady of the Night and the Celtic Cailleach, with a coda on a non-goddess, the Green Man. Setting the pattern for the book, he finds no evidence that Mother Earth featured in classical paganism. Figures like Natura were known, but only as allegorical abstractions. In the 19th century, however, European scholars, seeking proof of the ...”

“... Power Steering,Pedal-eeze Power Brakes, the rolling black cylinder speedometerFlashing green, yellow and red, holding steady at 65 mph, midnight blue frameEncasing me in terror, where I remain still, sleeping or awakeWhen I conjure that ride across that old deck plate and girder bridgeWith its big hump in the middle, all 29 spans, the muddy Raritan ...”

“... American realism, once a belief, is now an idle liberty. Writers such as Robert Stone, Joan Didion, John Irving and even Don DeLillo, are praised for their ‘realism’, for the solidity of their plots, the patience of their characterisation, the capillary spread of their social portraits, the leverage of their political insight ...”

“... in the Chapel Royal, St James’s on 11 May 1920: ‘Cimmie’s wedding dress had a design of green leaves in it, in defiance of a superstition that green at a wedding was unlucky: there was also a superstition that it was unlucky to be married in May. Cimmie herself chose the music: during the handing-over of the ring ...”

“... for once. Scale is uncertain. ‘This might be nature – twenty stories high,’ to borrow from Robert Lowell: We two, one cell here, lie gazing into the ether’s crystal ball, sky and a sky, and sky, and sky, till death – Well – death and the void may be part of it. City parks by night do have something sepulchral about them. The little white blobs of ...”

“... occasionally dangerous, peopled by ghosts – miners’ wives or the wandering monks who capture Robert Macfarlane’s imagination in the opening pages of his book. Our push and shove with the land is far from over; in fact you might consider the whole present consumerist extravaganza to be rage against the land, the ties that bind.All of this is preliminary ...”

“... align. I am Miss Stein and this bay is mine I am Miss Stein (pronounced Steen) and this sea is green That’s Porter, ventriloquising Gertrude Stein; but it could easily be one of the voices of Morgan. Yet where Morgan, like Miroslav Holub, chose to stay in his native land whether or not he was happy with its literary or party politics, Porter’s ...”

“... almost a thousand years after the pyramids, describes a sailor’s journey across the ‘Great Green’ to visit the royal mines. After a storm destroys his ship, he is stranded alone on a mythical island. There he encounters a talking snake, covered in gold and lapis lazuli, who declares himself ‘the lord of Punt’ and promises him a safe ...”

“... London in the late Twenties finds himself over sixty years later an American citizen, described by Robert Fagles as ‘arguably the finest Classicist of our day’, by Peter Green as one his nation ‘ought to bronze’, and by Jasper Griffin as a man ‘one would like to have as a friend’. In his long career he has ...”

“... in the Timaeus and Critias. But the reality was Patrick Duffy with webbed hands and fluorescent green contact lenses, painfully painted on. Sole survivor of Atlantis, he used his special powers, notably the ability to survive high atmospheric pressure, to foil the evil plans of an evil-looking villain with an evil-looking beard and an evil-sounding German ...”

“... irregular line of elms by the deep lane’. And like Sonnets from the Portuguese, which Robert Browning had advised Elizabeth to present as translations, and which were not published as her own until her death, Aurora Leigh is a remarkable tribute to the way in which new female independence, intelligence and sensibility can go with an equally ...”