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“... lots of them, but times have changed even in the world of noir. After the protagonist, John Glass, sneaks a smoke in his 39th-floor Manhattan office, he then spends a paragraph trying to dispose of the butt; when he lights up on the street he gets a lecture from the cop: ‘“You should quit,” he said. “Believe me, it makes a difference. Even in ...”

“... an interesting slip early in A.S. Byatt’s new novel. It is 1895. A young working-class man, Philip Warren, has been adopted by a liberal upper-class family, the Wellwoods. At the Kentish country home of Olive and Humphry Wellwood, a glorious Midsummer Party is in preparation. Humphry is a banker (though he will soon switch to journalism), and Olive is a ...”

“... in art, are now rarely viewed as anything but positive. In the era of rock and roll and of Philip Glass and John Adams, it seems normal and desirable for music to aspire to be a narcotic. We live in the time of the triumph of the ‘theatrocracy’ that Nietzsche deplored, in which we can find many descendants of Wagner’s favourite dramatic ...”

“... York, where he produced Talking Heads, curated the ‘No Wave’ compilation No New York, and took Philip Glass to see the B-52s. I was briefly in New York in the summer of 1981 and read a long interview with him in a paper called the East Village Eye. This was my first sighting of a kind of hagiographical fanboy profile Eno would increasingly attract; it ...”

“... like a too heavy satire of the modern world. ‘Modern’ here means tall buildings, lots of glass walls and doors, men in suits and squawking American women. America was always one of Tati’s targets. In Jour de Fête, François sees a supposed documentary about postal services in America – helicopters, daredevils and muscular male beauty contests ...”

“... a slightly too large nose. She went on to the Royal College of Art, joining the School of Stained Glass because she’d been told that, as a woman, she didn’t stand much chance of getting into the prestigious School of Painting. There’s an example of her stained glass work in the show: a fractured city below, including ...”

“... subjects of Barrow’s ‘double portrait’, his friends Quentin Crisp and the surrealist poet Philip O’Connor, were both children of the Home Counties. Crisp, who began life as Denis Pratt, found his way to bohemia from the Pooterland of Egmont Road, Sutton. O’Connor spent a significant part of his tumultuous life in Dorking, a fact which the local ...”

“... of the process that began then, and indeed it has a polemical preface by the renegade CIA agent, Philip Agee, who started the thing off, to be followed by other renegades like John Stockwell. Memoirs and exposures by disillusioned men like these, in the teeth of frantic efforts to suppress and discredit them, were only part of a public interplay that ...”

“... This godfather Wallace, civic booster, assiduous joiner of fraternal organisations, collector of glass bells and Hummel figurines, is reponsible for this festival in a more profound sense. Wallace Pfef brought to Argus the large-scale growing and refining of sugar beets, an innovation which in turn brought supermarket shopping and ended the planting of a ...”

“... described as ‘dazzlement’, éblouissement, a ‘theological rainbow’ he compared to stained glass in a church. As Taruskin wrote, ‘there is something genuinely scary about Messiaen at full strength.’ Messiaen would have agreed. ‘My music is not nice,’ he said in a BBC documentary in 1985. ‘I am convinced that joy exists. I am convinced that ...”

“... good, honest building. The ending of The Seven Lamps of Architecture vibrates through the work of Philip Webb, as of those Arts and Crafts architects who were his disciples. Austerity and self-abnegation are its hallmarks. You cannot relish Webb’s buildings without a feeling for puritanism. His was a life shot through with refusals: he would not ...”

“... objects made by a meticulous technique of inlay known as micromosaic, in which tiny fragments of glass are assembled to form a picture – not always in the best possible taste. Mark Girouard’s biography of James Stirling is constructed by a similar procedure, an astonishing accumulation of small details, asides and memories building up to a portrait. Big ...”

“... did it become a family activity. At first, the sets were nearly all battery-powered, meaning heavy glass accumulators which had to be carried to the shop to be recharged, and whose acid, if spilled, took the colour out of carpets and the polish off the sideboard; battery sets nevertheless remained in demand even when most people had mains electricity, because ...”

“... again, to fame, when readers were alerted to her fiction by the commendations of two admirers, Philip Larkin and David Cecil. Having been out, she became ‘the in-thing to read’, and reviewers rushed to praise the late novel Quartet in Autumn – now in paperback – as if it were a match for her early work.* Meanwhile her early work has been ...”

“... as in The Lady from Shanghai, where the revolver shots are lost, finally, in the splintering glass: by dint of looking at themselves in mirrors which reflect other mirrors, neither the gunman nor his human target any longer has much idea of what exactly is going on. It was in this doubting frame of mind that I approached J.H. Hexter’s On Historians, a ...”