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“... until three-quarters of the way through the book, but from the beginning it’s clear that Matt holds himself obscurely responsible. When Matt was 17 he was diagnosed with schizophrenia. According to his risk assessment, ‘he suffers from command hallucinations, which he attributes to a dead sibling.’ It becomes ...”

“... I call them books but nobody knows what they are, really: new stories about the fictional Glass family, another novel, a memoir of some kind, and tracts on homeopathy or Eastern religion are all possibilities. The only known reader of the new work is Salinger’s son, Matthew, but he may have been joined by Salinger’s widow, Colleen, and possibly by ...”

“... greenhouses in which the workers used to grow their vegetables are not merely empty: every pane of glass, every brick, every movable object has been removed by human termites. All that remains is the rusty metal skeleton. As you enter the steel plant, you face a long avenue lined with bushes that seems to stretch into infinity. Chinese trucks from the Fifties ...”

“... couples, suffering together the ordinary vicissitudes of love and work, and each raising a son: Matt, the slow but conscientious child of Leo and Erica; and Mark, the quick-witted and charming son of Bill and Lucille, who splits his time between his mother’s and Violet’s homes. The ordinary vicissitudes end when ...”

“... to look out because I’m a ‘clinically extremely vulnerable person’. They’re signed by ‘Matt’, Secretary of State for Health and Social Care. Another government minister, Robert Jenrick, Secretary of State for Housing, Communities and Local Government, signs them too, but he keeps his distance (and both his names). I’ve tried to explain to ...”

“... the rack of bloodied feet.*If not a cellar, an attic. If not walls of stone, then walls of glass.Now music from another room, the way it hangs in air,the way light scintillates, the way mirrors will passan image between them: raw scorch beneath the skin, that lidless stare.*Here, something is eating something. Here, a woman screamsinto the face of ...”

“... all move a little higher up the skyscraper of fame; each time one applies his chamois cloth to the glass, the rest of us, peering out from the gloom inside the building, see all their faces a little more clearly. Amis and Co aren’t the only gang of this kind, they’re just the oldest and the biggest. And it would be a mistake to assume that the biggest ...”

“... to achieve a richness in which glazes, underpainting, overpainting, and the contrast between matt and gloss surfaces all have a part to play. In it there are columns for earth, clay and egg as well as for various pigments, natural and synthetic, oils, resins and so forth. But the Seagram pictures seem to be relatively stable, unlike, say, the Harvard ...”

“... beyond, than it was in the collection’s former gallery in St John’s Wood, where it reflected a glass roof. You walk into it down a narrowing, steel-walled, waist-high passage, where black oil rises to the rim and stretches out all around you. The tank is neatly tailored to follow the room’s walls, mouldings and windows. Its unfathomable mirror-surface ...”

“... only eight months before. Having arrived in the same year as the Civil Partnership Register, Matt Houlbrook’s impressive study of queer life in London between 1918 and 1957 does much to revise our understanding of homosexuality in that period. Coverage of recent changes in the law has tended to portray the 20th century as a time of darkness, in which ...”

“... those of, say, 17th-century Dutch still-life painters, or Academy stalwarts who knew that their glass, twist of lemon and herring, girls in the garden, or wet street at night, would sell again and again. Nor do her series mark out a path towards the final resolution of a pictorial problem, or depict a scene in different light and weather in the way that ...”

“... utilised to turn out a stream of old oak beams, leaded window panes and small discs of bottled glass.’ The details in the black and white line drawings are wonderfully precise: not just of mouldings, doors and table ornaments, but of inhabitants too. That the furniture in ‘20th-Century Functional’ (bent plywood, Aalto perhaps) and the Bauhaus light ...”

“... being chased by wolves: he heard voices too, but considered them bothersome rather than dangerous. Matt, their ninth child, announced that he was Paul McCartney and that his moods controlled the weather. Peter, their tenth child, said that he was a secret agent who worked for Queen Elizabeth. Brian, their fourth child, seemed well enough until, aged 22, he ...”

“... inside. A puffy red brow might turn momentarily as if to compare itself with the clear brow behind glass. Occasionally, large birds were flung by the wind onto these windowsills – no longer omens for those ones inside who remained half-smiling, calm and beautiful at all times. The place where the young woman sat was brilliantly lit, but it was getting on ...”

“... have won out over the Marthas: no waste, value for money, efficiency. Everyone now seems to prefer matt to shiny and to distrust sparkle of any kind – in furnishings, in food, in philosophy and in poets. We prefer the sombre, darker tones, moodily suggesting depth and history. Brilliance is usually acceptable only if it goes hand in hand with breeding ...”