“... to the present). The term ‘dinosaur’ (meaning ‘terrible lizard’), coined in the 1840s by Richard Owen, is misleading: in fact dinosaurs are neither reptiles nor lizards (nor, inevitably, terrible). Charles Knight, who painted them for the American Museum of Natural History in New York and the Field Museum of Natural History in Chicago from the turn ...”

“... a classical education’ created ‘from external schemas of how a people’s history ought to read’. It would be hard to imagine a more powerful demonstration of the way early medieval historical narratives worked on European imaginations. My only demur would be over the labelling of Bryant as ‘naive’: surely he was no more so than the sixth-century ...”

“... to work in a lawyer’s office but dreamed of literary glory. In 1823 he moved to Paris, where he read insatiably, and wrote unperformable plays, overheated poems and a collection of stories which, when it was published in 1826 at his own expense, sold four copies. His father’s old colleagues, not wishing to resurrect their Napoleonic youth, were reluctant ...”

“... by adverse comment as by adulation. Now the two occurred together. Aiken said it was impossible to read Eliot without respect, but it was also ‘becoming increasingly impossible’ to read him ‘without misgivings’; at the end of his Dial review of For Lancelot Andrewes he goes so far as to say that some of the book ...”

“... paper and wire line guides to allow the blind to write so that the sighted could read it. His first European voyage was prescribed by his physician, who believed that the Mediterranean air would help his rheumatic pains. Instead of taking a sighted companion, he went alone across the Channel, tapping his solitary way south from ...”

“... than Kicks. ‘I do not feel like spending the rest of my life writing books that no one will read. It was not as though I wanted to write them.’ The spurs to fantasy in his case were failure and rejection, which he suffered on a grand scale – one of the reasons his biography makes such consoling reading for struggling writers. About twelve years ago ...”

“... culture of sameness.’ Yet unlike critics whose laments about McWorlds and the malling of America read as obituaries for urban culture, Bender finds counter-movements and new spaces emerging on the streets of New York and beyond. Contemporary critics and city planners misunderstand lived experience when they focus on dramatic urban centres and fail to see the ...”

“... car and knee-high grass, you know to quicken your step. Gardens are full of class, and we can read them like books. Gardening as an activity, however, is rather more complex than the gardens in which it results. It offers at least a fantasy of self-transformation. An accountant who spends his weekends laying York stone in the garden of his ruined manor in ...”

“... at home, unoccupied for thirty years or so, awaiting his return. Many even doubt whether she could read or write, while few have given much thought to how she might have been employed. Greer can’t prove it, but she argues convincingly that Ann, who came from a strongly Protestant family, would almost certainly have been taught to ...”

“... by the art of the engineer.’ While there is art in Maillart’s bridges, they can also be read as solutions to engineering problems involving dimensions, money, time, materials, strength and stability. When architects become enamoured of the visual elegance of solutions over and above the beauty of the statics and economics, when they imitate bone ...”

“... street was demolished in 1971, but you can see it clearly in the film 10 Rillington Place starring Richard Attenborough and John Hurt, filmed on location shortly before demolition. The houses had bay windows going all the way down to the ground, and no front steps or front gardens. Number 10 was the last house on the left, jammed up against the wall of a ...”

“... Vinal, already the mother of one illegitimate child, swore that the father of her next was one Richard Parkes, ‘husbandman of the parish of Ringmer’. On 25 October Turner set off at 2 a.m. for Ringmer, accompanied by two colleagues from East Hoathly, one of whom, a prosperous farmer called Jeremiah French, was known to Turner as a scourge of paupers ...”

“... published in 1971; a second major book, Allegories of Reading, appeared in 1980.* Anyone who has read even a single essay of de Man’s can gauge the quality of his mind. Many of his early pieces circulated as if they were dangerous to the academy, and assured him a samizdat reputation. His was an analytical temper that preferred essay to book, and each ...”

“... The most constant members of the group during this period were Bonamy Dobrée, F.S. Flint, Herbert Read and Orlo Williams, all of whom were frequent contributors (and, therefore, frequent recipients of letters from Eliot), with several others participating more sporadically. In practice, Eliot still seems to have made the decisions and carried on the editorial ...”

“... its certainties irretrievable. The writer is trapped inside a dialectical cage. That’s why we read him.Fanon’s prose defies translation: even his titles are obscure. Les Damnés de la terre doesn’t mean The Wretched of the Earth. Not really. Not unless you know what ‘la terre’ signifies to the French (too much, alas) and where the whole phrase ...”