“... weak, and had to spend long hours of the day in bed. But there was a new source of comfort in his frank belief that he was writing something wonderful, an autobiographical sketch in which he had managed at last to construct an archaeology of his own early life. He gave us the text to read while he rested, and I remember how apprehensive I was that I ...”

“... and miniature blown-glass bimbos, as a not so grand finale. In between, we have everything from Thomas Jefferson to Thomas Cole to Thomas Eakins to Thomas Hart Benton; from Mary Cassatt to Georgia O’Keeffe to Eva Hesse; from the ...”

“... values, typified by Mr Pooter, and schoolboys lapped up the snobbish school stories of Frank Richards. They also demanded new sporting heroes: many cricketers became celebrities, particularly if they cultivated swagger. W.G. Grace maintained his stardom because few knew he had a squeaky voice, but several other on-field heroes ...”

“... one of nine children; his father ran a livestock farm. As a young man, he was variously described, Thomas Patterson writes, as ‘disputatious, officious, bossy, ornery, curious, energetic, impudent, eager, smart, a show-off, contemptuous of rules’ and, generally, as a ‘pesterance’. After working as a travelling salesman, Long went to college, obtained a ...”

“... that of any other writer – certainly no modern Irish writer – but he has learned a lot from Thomas Pynchon. He has learned, for example, the potentially disastrous lesson that it’s possible to write a novel of ideas that’s vast in scope and light, even jaunty, in tone – to write about physics and farting side by side, not just as an exercise in ...”

“... Among​ the poems Edward Thomas drafted in 1916, shortly before he was posted to France, was ‘As the team’s head-brass’. The poet, seated in the boughs of a fallen elm, watches a ploughman at work ‘narrowing a yellow square/Of charlock’. He exchanges words with him as he pauses at the turn of each furrow, so that the conversational back and forth maps at intervals onto the changing geometry of the field ...”

“... For many people, Frank Gehry is not only our master architect but our master artist as well. In the current retrospective which is about to transfer from the Guggenheim in New York to the one in Bilbao, he is often called a genius without a blush of embarrassment (Thomas Krens, Guggenheim director and Gehry ‘collaborator’, can’t get enough of the word ...”

“... him personally it aroused feelings of alienation, the sense of being an exile in his own land. For Thomas Friedman, a Jewish American journalist, the refugee camp atrocities produced ‘something of a personal crisis’ and tore away ‘every illusion’ he had ‘ever held about the Jewish state’. And for Robert Fisk, who no longer had illusions about that ...”

“... animals and characters with funny names. I’m not wild about whimsy myself, and a first glance at Thomas Pynchon’s new novel had me worried. I could scarcely be surprised by the funny names or the animals, since Pynchon’s early fiction had people called Dennis Flange, Rachel Owlglass and Emory Bortz, and in Mason & Dixon there is a considerable speaking ...”

“... Education: The New Crisis of Adult Authority in the Classroom’, based on the book by Frank Furedi, out that same weekend.1 ‘We’, apparently, were ‘very excited’ when ‘we’ realised Furedi’s book was being launched at the same time as the Battle of Ideas; Furedi is ‘one of the UK’s, indeed Europe’s, indeed the world’s leading ...”

“... Lewis Thomas is a physician, a scientist, a medical administrator, and a man of letters whose previous books, The Lives of a Cell (1974) and The Medusa and the Snail (1979), and occasional writing for the New England Journal of Medicine have brought him a large following. The Youngest Science will meet his fans’ highest expectations ...”

“... one by Franz Kline, the other by Willem de Kooning (they accompany poems written on the plates by Frank O’Hara and Harold Rosenberg respectively), a medium that makes delicate scratching and hatching possible is turned over to coarse brush strokes and crabbed handwriting. Yet both these plates and Lewis’s derive part of their force from a characteristic ...”

“... photographs before he arrived as a student at the Art Institute in Chicago. He was drawn to Degas, Thomas Eakins and Hopper and to the quotidian and ordinary as subject matter. He originally wanted to study architecture, and buildings, rather than the human figure, take precedence throughout his work. ‘I was connecting more to the city than to any ...”

“... Halsted Street where Theodore Dreiser’s Sister Carrie lived; the Board of Trade building where Frank Norris’s novel The Pit is set; Studs Lonigan’s street corner on the South Side from James Farrell’s trilogy; the block of South Drexel where Bigger Thomas in Richard Wright’s Native Son killed and incinerated his ...”

“... but she was reluctant to let clichés about the natural world attach themselves to her work. Frank O’Hara sent a letter within days of reading the interview, to congratulate ‘ma Baudelairienne actuelle’ on the central picture, George Went Swimming at Barnes Hole, But It Got Too Cold, which he said he longed to see again. He was too ...”