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“... their unforced, drifting quality, the small shapes in them like knots and flutters in a vast empty field. The worst choke the field with optical buzz. The sustained unseriousness of Matisse’s brush with religion at this time, which served him so well as an artist, always threatens to collapse in the cut-outs into ritzy ...”

“... 10 March. At 6:45 a.m. I set off by car service to Newark airport to catch the 10 a.m. Virgin/Continental flight to Gatwick. At this time of the morning the New Jersey Turnpike is too busy altogether. This use of altogether, I’m reminded by Terence Patrick Dolan in A Dictionary of Hiberno-English, means ‘wholly, completely’ and may be compared to the Irish phrase ar fad, particularly in its positioning at the end of a sentence ...”

“... with the Russian glonass system to achieve ‘sub-inch accuracy’, the beet farmer tills his field in strips, leaving a narrow band of fallow earth between each row to help keep water and nutrients in the soil. Each seed is planted in a precise, recorded position, with more of them in the more fertile parts of the ...”

“... writers before Jane Austen’ are an arbitrary bunch, many obtained from a hacker’s job on Janet Todd’s Dictionary of British and American Women Writers 1660-1800. Spender calls this a ‘Dictionary of Women Novelists’ – a significant blunder. Todd covers poets, dramatists, letter-writers and essayists, whereas ...”

“... physical, even metaphysical. This may be why it is, as Achenbaum puts it, still more of a field – using methodologies borrowed from elsewhere – than an autonomous subspeciality. The state of being old is in part socially constructed. It is others (or the Collective Other) – with their attitudes, stereotypes and laws – who translate wrinkles ...”

“... of Dock Green and Jack Warner of Hollywood. Jayne Mansfield lines up alongside Mantovani, and Field-Marshal Viscount Montgomery is discovered between Maria Montez and Dudley Moore. Kim Novak and Ivor Novello are neighbours, but then so are Mozart and Malcolm Muggeridge, and the French sandwich of Arletty and Yvonne Arnaud contains Anthony ...”

“... and their multicoloured worlds of sauciness and sorcery – then switch to the stark monochrome field of Horses, and other images waiting in the wings: Richard Hell, Iggy Pop, the Ramones. It really was, as the old cliché has it, that black and white. There was no commando unit of primpy stylists for Smith in 1975 – just her, Mapplethorpe and (as related ...”

“... very passage to show that the ancient Germans were barbarians. Playing the philologist as Sweeney Todd played the barber, Celtis simply declared a scribal error and emended the line to read, nonsensically but harmlessly, ‘with his victims [huius quoque hostiis]’. Many of his successors emulated him. Again and again – as Krebs shows with meticulous ...”

“... been one really good edition of anything that Shakespeare wrote,’ he told the writer Ruthven Todd, ‘and that is an edition of Venus and Adonis that I did myself.’ Stephen Spender, who met Jennings in Germany in 1945, noticed the film-maker’s ‘bumptious expression’, as well as his ‘pin-head face’ and ‘flapping ears’. Jennings talked and ...”

“... deserter. The book ends with his arrest, facing a sentence of a hundred lashes and a fortnight’s field-punishment. The Image of a Drawn Sword, in its way not inferior to Kafka (though Brooke had read no Kafka at the time the novel was written), has a haunting sinister quality very well maintained. One wonders if the whole theme came to birth when Brooke was ...”

“... referendum victory only make sense if economics and culture are seen as two aspects of a single field, whose fundamental substance is the collective psyche of voters; a field in which apparently unconnected economic and cultural abstractions (GDP, a lost empire) and apparently unconnected economic and cultural ...”

“... felt happy hiding in the internet and he said yes, it was his home. On a good day it is the bright field that contains all souls but on a bad day it is the final darkness, where misery is gapingly exposed. I came to believe that Wright, this last year, was fighting for his soul on that plain, like Aeneas with his ships at his back and all hell in front of ...”