“... 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 ...”

“... made him king in more or less everything but name, the death of Oliver, the succession of his son Richard, the collapse of the Protectorate, and the Restoration of Charles II, all in the space of twenty years, might be forgiven for being confused about politics. As the journalist Marchamont Nedham put it in one of his ‘Letters from Utopia’ in 1657, There ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... of a sexually explicit diary delivered to the Court while the trial was underway. Carman: Can you read that sentence? Allan: It says his wife has a weak . . . I can’t read that word. I think it says ‘heart’. Carman: Are you sure it begins with an H? Allan: It’s not the word you think it is. Judge: What word ...”

“... mature to be ruled by a secular left. Opposed to one another though they are, all these versions read the Iranian protests as a conflict between Islamic hardliners and pro-Western liberal reformists. That is why they find it so difficult to locate Mousavi: is he a Western-backed reformer who wants to increase people’s freedom and introduce a market ...”

“... Old One. It is generous of Wade not to ridicule this. Like most romantic rituals, it is hard to read about without wincing: ‘The OO commands me to send a wave of his paw’ and so on. Mirrlees has been blamed for encouraging Harrison to destroy her papers. Wade doesn’t agonise too much over the reasons for this. It is easy to assume that, along with the ...”

“... the sports coverage, introducing women’s pages and focusing on high-profile trials. James Canham Read was hanged for the murder of Florence Dennis, having slept with both her and her sister. His last words, according to the Evening News, were ‘Will it hurt?’ This was perhaps a question to which the answer was ‘Yes’. In retrospect, all these gambits ...”

“... ever believe a word we wrote. I cannot count the number of letters I get from people who have read my column in the Mirror and say, ‘We simply couldn’t believe your article about X and wonder if you could tell us whether he is suing you’ –or something of the sort. When I worked for Private Eye, this reaction was even more common. Private Eye, one ...”

“... where distinctions between hand and machine are difficult to recover. In different ways, Warhol, Richard Hamilton, James Rosenquist, Gerhard Richter and Sigmar Polke produce a related conundrum of the painterly and the photographic; it is a prime characteristic of Pop art at its best.Lichtenstein’s work abounds in manually made signs of mechanically ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... Other, less basic venues soon sprang up. In Charlotte Street, the prosperous Communard Victor Richard opened a grocery which became a centre of advice and help for arriving refugees – and a haunt for police spies. A few doors along, Elisabeth Audinet – a militant in the radical socialist Blanquist faction – ran a restaurant. These places resounded ...”

“... 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 ...”