“... blood, he will lodge a blank-verse line where it is then full of a race-memory: ‘I removed the stone and felt into the hole in front of the footlocker, my fingers scraping and searching into this soft loam like field mice at the edge of food, and I felt something – it could be flesh or hair or some moist sponge – I didn’t know what, but my ...”

“... out – the exact path that a given load was taking through the network of assembled steel and stone. It was certain that the loads, dead and live, were being resisted. As they are today and will be tomorrow. Until they’re not. Another story Galdi liked to tell involved the design of a car park. He was once asked to determine the total load on such a ...”

“... mace’ in a context which actually refers, as Milton didn’t, to the act of turning things into stone; and he makes a more spectacular appearance in a marginal note in the ‘Weimar’ section, which reads thus: ‘Du matin jusqu’au midi il roula du midi jusqu’au soir d’un jour d’été et avec le soleil couchant il s’abattit du zénith comme une ...”

“... a pea below her twenty mattresses is hurting her. A prince is metamorphosed from a frog (the poet Norman MacCaig used to say it would be even better if a frog metamorphosed from a prince). Wordsworth, feeling he had to deplore the increasingly moralistic instruction of the young, refers in The Prelude to those ‘guards and wardens’ who would ‘control all ...”

“... hoovering up foreign investment: an image launched in 1996 with the very nice, if not very long, Norman Foster metro. It is true that a majority of Bilbainos and many war-weary folk outside the Biscay province who would quite like a decent image for Euskadi find their political or cultural objections outweighed by an understandable pleasure in the Gehry ...”

“... Collected Poems begins: ‘The radiance of that star that leans on me/Was shining years ago.’ Norman MacCaig might have written that in the 1950s. It was in this decade that Jennings’s poetic ear matured, and it remained attuned to verse then fashionable (Metaphysical poetry, Hopkins, mid-Eliot, Auden, Muir). She is a poet who uses a lot of abstract ...”

“... saw Keating’s criminal career exposed, largely through the diligence of the art critic Geraldine Norman, who had become suspicious about the number of Samuel Palmers coming on the market. She later helped Keating write his autobiography and he went on to have a career as a minor celebrity with his own television show.Did I like my picture more because of ...”

“... in the Conservative camp, on which all their three great warlords agreed – Margaret Thatcher, Norman Tebbit and Lord Young – as did their retinues of ad-men and advisers, was to run a campaign fuelled by fear, a re-run of ‘Don’t let Labour ruin it.’ Fear was a tune which the Prime Minister had practised assiduously over the years: fear of ...”

“... my entire top shelf, or cupboard-top, of books: Ian McEwan’s First Love, Last Rites, Junkie, Norman Mailer, Henry Miller, Lolita, books which I had lovingly collected from jumble sales and Oxfam shops, and which I now had a strong sense were somehow ‘wrong’. We’d done ‘The Wife of Bath’s Tale’ for O-level English, so that stayed. Nineteen ...”

“... building was a luxury for most people and the indoor weather made by coloured light falling on stone at Canterbury or Chartres must have been a welcome respite from the familiar realities of wind and rain. In the earliest literature in English it is usually cold, as most people presumably were; but here too, detailed descriptions are rare. The ice and the ...”

“... But if we look for Wordsworth as a live presence in the poetry of this century, we come up with Norman Nicholson and Basil Bunting, and who else? In a tight spot Wall-ace Stevens appealed to the famous line from ‘Michael’, ‘And never lifted up a single stone’ (drawing from it unwarrantable inferences, as Robinson ...”

“... Fountain’s long apprenticeship is that his 1970s-vintage literary models – among them Robert Stone, Joan Didion and Norman Mailer in Vietnam-era reportage mode – turned out to be pretty useful for a writer hitting his stride at the start of the 21st century. His main adjustments concern mood. For the pill-popping ...”

“... Sherman, who himself plays the dissipated drunkard Maximillian Cady. Cady and his successor, Norman Maine in A Star is Born, stand for many careers that foundered in drink and suicide. Today’s Hollywood producers and executives make more literal use of watering holes. Deals are christened with Perrier and story-pitching film-makers are met with clear ...”

“... all that mud-stained primitive clutter: for an inkling of how matters stood at the Louvre, imagine Norman Bates having to watch Marion Crane’s car being winched from the swamp beside the motel. A solution was found. It appeared to favour the rugged party over the dandies and took the form of a new commission. The building would go up on a plot of public land ...”

“... hard at work on what he anticipated as his masterpiece, a tragedy called Death of Guiscard, the Norman. He hoped the play would revolutionise contemporary theatre, transcend Shakespeare and ‘tear the wreath off’ Goethe’s head. It’s not surprising that he couldn’t finish it. After struggling with Guiscard for five hundred days and nights, he ...”