“... in grocery stores. Most cases were dedicated to a specific martyr, containing his belt, bullets he may have fired, or were fired at him, maybe even the shrapnel or bullet that killed him, his government-issue toothbrush, his ID, a school report, a brush and comb. A red and yellow striped shirt, good as new, next to a picture of a young man wearing it; a shot ...”

“... off to school at the age of nine, took the separation especially hard. The early dislocation may not have caused Arthur’s lifelong insecurities, but it can’t have helped. There was no question of giving Annie, the capable and energetic girl of the family, an English schooling. She gathered what education she could from her mother, supplemented by ...”

“... Penrose had brought from Venice. Afterwards he sat in a room alone, weeping. ‘Whatever humour may dominate,’ Penrose writes, ‘there is always instability in P.’s mood. While in the happiest of moods, for some imperceptible reason a shadow falls across his face. It becomes pale, ridden with care and his eyes blacken like two nails driving deep into ...”

“... his own Big Ideas are true. His films come off like Eisenstein with a voiceover, and though Curtis may not share the belief, held by some Soviet directors of the 1920s, that viewers’ reactions can be precisely manipulated by fine-tuning the duration, content and juxtaposition of images, he certainly aims to seduce. I find myself more worried by his ...”

“... not you know my circumstances, you would not treat me thus.’ Chatterton’s most astute readers may then have been the 18th-century philologists rather than the Romantic poets, despite the emphasis in the title of this book. Probably the best Romantic summary of Chatterton’s career is Wordsworth’s, because he skirts the issues of poverty and obscurity ...”

“... in bed waiting for the statement. Bush said that there had been an apparent act of terrorism. He may have said more. The only other thing I remember him saying was ‘God bless America.’ I live downtown and decided that I should go take a look. On the way I stopped and bought a cup of coffee. I reached Broadway and couldn’t see the towers so I headed ...”

“... discuss the unreliable, energy-sapping machines that can be seen on city streets today. There may be almost a billion bicycles in the world (by Herlihy’s estimate), but many of their owners have yet to discover the pleasures of cycling. This sunny view of bicycling history makes it easy to imagine those blissful days of well-designed bike paths and ...”

“... But these are college-age children, who certainly have their own angsts: their mother may be about to leave their father; and among the hyper-sensitive population of Bending Heaven, it’s unlikely that anyone’s sleep is ...”

“... of purpose. Such books were not always very attractive or even very interesting, though we may learn to miss them just because their elevation already seems old-fashioned. Last year, the prize’s new sponsors let it be known that it was time for a shiny new populism, and so far the judges have concurred. Neither prize-winner, under the new regime, has ...”

“... likes lying inside his sleeping bag and how he likes to eat cheese grated with his own grater, but may not excuse confessions such as ‘I also love leaping around the furniture. I like to do this approximately every half hour, or even every fifteen minutes if I can manage it. I also enjoy making noises like “Zzzhhh Zzzhhh” quite a lot.’ Christopher ...”

“... the visible exits, so they had to conclude that this was the end of that particular route. There may be other ways to penetrate still lower in the Arabika. For the time being, however, the Ukrainian cavers are concentrating on a new possibility, in the Aladaglar massif in the Taurus Mountains of eastern Turkey. A difficult, even dangerous place, either above ...”

“... voices rise optimistically. The last chord, on ‘fry’, could be celebrating a wedding. ‘I’ may be freezing and burning, but sounds pretty well on it. Weelkes is again using the harmonies to contradict the words. Although the madrigal developed in Italy, the composers who created it came from the north: Philippe Verdelot was born at Les ...”

“... even know their building is going to be demolished, or they just hear rumours.’ A new metro may solve the transport problem, but the new buildings will not add significantly to the housing stock. Some of the most moving parts of the exhibition are those that recognise the Chêne Pointu as a place with its own identity. ‘It had a village ...”

“... that the Aliyev government expected, and wanted, the Karabakh Armenians to leave. As recently as May, Pashinyan was hinting that Armenia might be willing to acknowledge Nagorno-Karabakh as part of Azerbaijan in return for security guarantees for its ethnically Armenian population. An orderly negotiated settlement wasn’t beyond the realms of ...”

“... appetite for abstraction and the fastidiousness that marked much of his work thereafter:We may consider every cloud a lakeTransmogrified, its character unselfed,At once a whale and a white wedding cakeBellowed into conspicuous ectoplasm.It is a lake’s ghost that goes voyaging.The book received measured but disappointing reviews (‘many of the poems ...”