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“... the bustling urban environment in which they grew up and with which they interacted. There are two fine chapters on the functions of limewood sculpture and its market, which cast a searching light on the more mundane circumstances of artistic production. At the same time, he never forgets that these represent opportunities offered to the artist by his ...”

“... In the Economist of 27 May 1978, details were published of a secret report by a Conservative Party policy group on the nationalised industries. Each industry would be allocated a minimum rate of return on capital; managers who failed to achieve this target would be sacked. The report, drafted by the MP Nicholas Ridley, recognised that the pressures to economise would inevitably threaten management-union conflict ...”

“... is that he tells us what happened next, tracking how more reliable but less colourful figures like Bob Willcock and Len England kept the organisation going. However, Hinton has also counted the directives and file reports, and shows how rapidly the work of volunteer data collection declined after Harrisson ceded control: from 1663 topic collections in 1940, to ...”

“... often seem designed for target practice, require the sitters to be sitting ducks as well. But Bob Dylan can’t stand sitting. Try playing chess with him: ‘His knees bounce up against the table so much you think you are at a séance. The pieces keep jumping around the board. But he beats me every time.’ (Dave Van Ronk said that.) That must be how ...”

“... High School of Science and Juilliard, where I studied piano. Not wanting to go where my brother Bob went, I chose Yale – where, like him, I majored in music. (A far better pianist, Bob left Harvard in the spring of 1968.) One teacher there was the musicologist Betty Boop (or so I’ll call her), who covered the 18th ...”

“... want to kill themselves.The Librarianist follows the uneventful life of a retired librarian called Bob Comet. After helping a lost elderly woman find her way, he begins volunteering at a nursing home in his hometown of Portland, Oregon. Bob is a man of routine; he spends his time walking, cooking and cleaning. His love of ...”

“... The exact motive for Lena’s arson is unknown, although it may be a protest at her husband Bob’s recent and untimely death. Understanding the importance of making a good impression, Ella brings a ‘strategic’ box of See’s candy for Mrs Lowenstein and wears a pair of bone-coloured Italian leather shoes. Ella, too, is a widow, and to avoid coming ...”

“... to the fruits of Western materialism, and he has a sharp eye for the resulting confusions. In a fine comic episode, the author returns from a visit to a monastery to drown his spiritual bewilderment in drink (something called chang which, in keeping with the spirit of the place, inebriates without aftermath), then entertains the Ladakhi youth with a ...”

“... also directed the Bourne-like version of 2009); and performances equal to any of that decade, by Bob Peck and Joe Don Baker. A fine thing about the movie was that it required thought. Indeed, the subject of the 1985 Edge of Darkness was the difficulty of thinking about the motives that exert a constant control on life and ...”

“... Only Looks Expensive’), Paul Williams recalls an unrewarding encounter with Bob Dylan: ‘But I shook his hand which was ... and this was at the beginning of the tour ... and things changed significantly during the tour ... he became more sociable, I’ve been talking to a number of people who did see him backstage later on in the ...”

“... Its four sections are divided into stanzas or ‘fits’, each ending with a device known as the bob-and-wheel: a short line, normally two words with one stress, followed by a three-stressed quatrain whose second and fourth lines rhyme with the bob. Thus: So in peril and pain Sir Gawain made progress, Criss-crossing the ...”

“... to the threat posed by a sinister and nebulous enemy from the other side of the world. It could be Bob Dylan performing his ‘Talkin’ John Birch Paranoid Blues’ (‘I discovered there was red stripes on the American flag’); but the year is 2002, and the song is ‘Talkin’ Al Kida Blues’ (‘Cuba’s our enemy, unless we need a prison camp’). Al ...”

“... the perpetuation of bad smells, and generation of partial diseases’. Smells and diseases were fine, as long as they were the ‘consequence of non-interference by authorities with the dwellings of the multitude’. Happily for the Economist, the Saxon spirit survived Morpeth and his ‘Prussian’ reforms. By the late 1850s, the state was in retreat as ...”

“... everyone has their confessional niche. Byron famously remarked that ‘Augustine in his fine Confessions makes the reader envy his transgressions’; no such envy is likely to arise from reading Ryan’s accounts of his joyless couplings. He reached his lowest point when he found himself driving hundreds of miles one weekend with the sole purpose of ...”

“... else on surfaces or first impressions: you can’t judge an accused man by his physiognomy. Fine. But as the number of books jostling for readers’ attention has grown, publishers have toiled to make it not only possible but ever easier to judge books by their covers. So to say that ‘you can’t judge a book by its cover’ and mean it literally is ...”