“... of the collection: The slab of aluminium he must cut is now anchored to the machine table with more than twice the torque required to keep extremely hard heat-treated tool steel from moving under the force of cutting. Reading such passages, one wonders whether realism really requires such fidelity to austere local idioms, whether indeed a ...”

“... the Glucksteins and their relations the Salmons, and the rise and fall of their commercial empire. Thomas Harding, a descendant through his mother, grew up knowing little about that side of his family; his book is an engaging blend of historical research and personal affection. The Glucksteins began as the Glücksteins in Jever near Bremen and seem always to ...”

“... themselves: the porcine and lecherous minister of culture, for example, played with fine relish by Thomas Thieme, and Wiesler’s superior officer, a cheerful, unscrupulous man of ambition, slyly played by Ulrich Tukur. But everyone else is worried. A shot of the Stasi archive, late in the film, reminds us why. Here are shelves after shelves of files, a whole ...”

“... as a Catholic schoolboy. Morris was Jewish, one of the first Jews I had ever met, making it even more embarrassing. Leavis, at this time, acknowledged Cambridge customs and proprieties by defying them. He wore a gown when the situation required it, but with shirt open, collar up, and no tie, and with the gown most of the time bundled over his arm. When he ...”

“... enough). The building is beautifully described by Bellow in Seize the Day. The Chelsea makes many more star appearances, but it’s the denizens of the place, their celebrity and sheer numbers – from Mark Twain through several generations of artists, cranks and druggies, to Sid Vicious – that warrant its reputation. Almost no one on the New York arts ...”

“... his subject’s significance as an archetype: he presents a shining vessel of high femininity, no more than lightly dusted with accidents of character. ‘Prudence (Minerva) Overthrowing Ignorance (or Sedition)’ (c.1632-33) Pieter Bruegel, Rubens’s predecessor as painter-philosopher in Antwerp, is acknowledged several times in the Royal Academy’s ...”

“... much ingenuity in planning as office life. Imagining what it would be like to live in a house is more intriguing than imagining how it would feel to work in a bank, and amateurs have as much right as anyone to an opinion.The question that always arises is whether the architect has to serve the client’s wishes or should plan for a better way of ...”

“... revealed that there were other ways of writing verse than those prescribed either by the Dylan Thomas school of apocalyptic word-chimers, or by the Movement, in whose manifestos he detected – rightly, I think – a fatal ‘whiff of little Englandism’. So, after beginning unsteadily, with early poems that had not quite assimilated the influences of ...”

“... taxes can be cut while military spending is piled high, and those deficits – hey, who cares any more? Totemic fame has its price. Eponymous labels can be misleading. Economists who have never actually read any of the works of Keynes and Schumpeter nonetheless confidently invoke their names in identifying stylised concepts; and it is pointless to complain ...”

“... robes, clambering up and down staircases of keys or key-thumping in caverns. ‘After all,’ Thomas Mullaney writes, ‘if a Chinese typewriter is really the size of two ping-pong tables put together, need anything more be said about the deficiencies of the Chinese language?’ To many Western eyes, the characters were ...”

“... He would sit there in his old raincoat and brown trilby, rocking slightly as he wove his ever more exuberant fantasies, on which, I have to admit, I looked less admiringly then than I do in retrospect. I had the spot in the show immediately following Peter’s monologue, which was scheduled to last five minutes or so but would often last for fifteen, when ...”

“... they were published with immense success in 1590 as illustrations (engraved by Theodor de Bry) to Thomas Harriot’s Briefe and True Report of the New Found Land of Virginia – suggests that what was made as a record was used as advertising. The Report was issued in German, Latin and French editions as well as in English. That Harriot and White’s book was ...”

“... What a good subject, or at least successful subject, consists in, according to the machine, is more so. The computer looks for subjects by looking for clusters of nouns – if kitten, furball, whiskers and paws appear then some of the book is about cats – and calculating how much space the clusters take up. In a sample of 5000 novels 0.001 per cent of ...”

“... name. The ritual of identification has rules. For example, no animal or plant has been allowed more than one scientific name since Linnaeus established the system of applying first a generic and then a specific name in his Systema Naturae two and a half centuries ago. This form of shorthand was a blessing, replacing as it did Latin descriptions that were ...”

“... Founded by private subscription in 1841, the London Library was the brainchild of Thomas Carlyle, a serious man. For its 150th anniversary, the present guardians of the London Library have chosen an eminent comedian, John Wells, to write their celebratory history. The sage of Chelsea would not have been amused. But then, nothing did amuse him ...”