“... very close. Our families had met and my wife Catherine and Colette Fuller were friends. We found a field south of London, not far out, surrounded by trees and with a stream in which the children could paddle while the adults ate, drank, talked and snoozed. Peter’s subsequent enthusiasm for nature was always undermined for me by my sense of how out of context ...”

“... loved his subject as Boswell loved Johnson, seeing Mailer through a thousand eyes, but leaving the field clear for the rest of us who only have one pair. My last evening with Norman was decisive. When the Paris Review appeared containing the interview we worked on together, an event was arranged at the New York Public Library. To tell the truth, Norman ...”

“... she pursues a love affair begun in the summer balls of her final year, her last taste of Eden. Andrew, an engineer and semipro rock musician, was initially attracted to Grace because she ‘looked like a person’ (what did he expect – a tomato?). The novel follows a year or so of their courtship, his musical career and her research. Affairs of ...”

“... ageing from the broadest perspective’ – is a neonate among the sciences. Indeed, according to Andrew Achenbaum in his perceptive, beautifully written and superbly organised history of American gerontology, it has not yet fully emerged as a science. There are many reasons why ageing is attracting so much scientific and quasi-scientific attention. For a ...”

“... contains lives up to the expectations aroused by the late Professor Mansergh’s eminence in this field of history, and though one might have wished for a fuller treatment of the subsequent half-century, what he has to say of this aftermath contains much that is thought-provoking and acute. In the introduction Dr Mansergh himself describes the book as in some ...”

“... for the Steelers.’ The city is home to the Andy Warhol Museum on Sandusky Street, where Andrew Warhola was born in 1928. As the director John Waters has said, every kid needs someone really bad to look up to, and the Warhol legacy carries on that counter-cultural role for a new generation. The museum recently organised an exhibition of the prison ...”

“... resources in a single programme called ‘Nine Eyes’. A strong proponent of this project is C (Andrew Scott, who wouldn’t look out of place in Cameron’s cabinet), who is intent on merging MI5 and MI6, and a Spectre mole. Shuttering the double-0 programme and retiring Bond are on C’s agenda: 007 is obsolete in the age of drones and wiretaps. This is ...”

“... Bunin and Gorky – still followed the tradition. In a glossy equivalent of Country Life or the Field, called The Capital and the Estate, which appeared between 1913 and 1917 and mixed social gossip with serious magazine pieces on big houses, a writer nostalgically reminisced on the many Russian writers who were ‘fledglings of Russian estates, and from ...”

“... the whole thing there), his plain-but-emotional rhythms and syntax remind one of Larkin and even Andrew Motion. A more surprising influence is Eliot: ‘My self-possession gutters; we are really in the dark’ has the sort of rhythmical hysteria and claustrophobic shadowiness that Hamilton has made his own; and a line from ‘La Figlia Che ...”

“... more than eight hundred distraught relatives marched on City Hall, and the newspapers had a field day. The leader of Westminster City Council stood firm at first, telling the relatives that they were ‘peddling cheap emotions for the cameras’, but eventually agreed to buy the cemeteries back when the bad publicity refused to go away. It took five ...”

“... It is also the only European country which still administers the death penalty. (If you widen the field to include the Organisation for Security and Co-operation in Europe, there are six other dictatorships: Azerbaijan and the five ‘stan’ states of Central Asia – all, like Belarus, former Soviet republics.) The ‘last dictatorship’ tag comes from ...”

“... tucked away in flat farmland, its whereabouts indicated by a brown road sign pointing across a field of beet (or so it was last autumn). The aqueduct is a fairly short affair; it carried the canal across a narrow, shallow river valley, and replaced an earlier one, still unfinished when it was swept away by a violent flood in 1795. The flood left intact ...”

“... this training has no effect upon a people, the American energy will continually demand a wider field for its exercise.’ Commentators before and after Turner have also found in mobility – especially its volitional form, travel – the genius of modernity and the signature of the sovereign self. The love of cars (and the hatred of them) often comes with ...”

“... the Convention were much keener to meet Moore than they were to meet Howard Dean, who had led the field among the candidates for the nomination until he found himself coming over a bit crazed on television. Moore spent much of the week sitting next to Jimmy Carter in a private part of the convention centre’s dress circle. John Kerry’s liberalism has had ...”

“... culture. Although the study of British retailing is, as she explains, a flourishing academic field, Victorian consumerism has been a neglected topic, despite the wealth of material on merchandising, advertising, public transportation, tea shops and the theatre. While her relationship to this material appears to be strictly intellectual – she mentions ...”