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“... at Harvard, then teaching fiction at Emerson College in Boston; Syracuse, where he went to be close to the poet Mary Karr; Bloomington-Normal for his first secure position at Illinois State; and finally Pomona College, in Claremont, California, where he killed himself in 2008 at the age of 46. He emerged as a writer from a university-based avant-garde ...”

“... and unsentimentally. There can seem to be no problem. In ‘Poem Read at Joan Mitchell’s’ Frank O’Hara writes that The poem goes on too long because our friendship has been long. In the context of poetry and longevity friendship seems to take a quite natural place at the civilised table. Mention of ‘friendship’, that is. What about John ...”

“... affectionate, and all life-long.’ What of that first impetuous excursion to Delphi with young Frank Lushington, when the happy pair decked their hats and horses with wild flowers? ‘I do not think the key to this is precisely sexual attraction, but the spring in Greece at full blast,’ says Levi, in the spirit of Honi soit. The diaries of that period ...”

“... the superior authenticity of the voice on the spot, but the overall picture you get is a blur of close-ups. Juliet Gardiner had written very well on social conditions in wartime Britain, and on the changes brought about in the country by the huge scale of the American occupation. I remember American cities, lavishly equipped for the GIs’ comfort and ...”

“... within, and not inferior examples of, the tradition which includes Dubliners and the stories of Frank O’Connor. They unsettle one’s sense of period by suggesting (no doubt correctly) that there are hidden tribes close to home practising rites and obeying taboos which have dropped below the horizon of fictional ...”

“... fragment of the Ottoman Empire is the Greek Orthodox Church.’ Dinner with Persephone pays close attention to the everyday objects which appear in Greek dreams and to the interpretations these dreams receive in books and in ordinary life (the women of Mani, in the Peloponnese, are reputed to be the best dream interpreters). Among others, Storace cites ...”

“... who was allowed to flee the country after being involved in a male brothel scandal, and a close friend of his Cambridge tutor, James Kenneth Stephen, a cousin of Virginia Woolf, who fasted to death in an asylum after Eddy died. Is that all the scandal, then? Well no, not quite. Eddy died in 1892 only weeks after he became engaged to Princess May (as ...”

“... Gordale Scar with the whole range of studies and drawings for that picture (unluckily, too close to megalomania to be taken seriously as the masterpiece which, as a painterly performance, it undoubtedly was) revealed how much of the natural thing-in-itself was still within reach of Rubenist style in the 19th century. The studies and drawings of Gordale ...”

“... own style of thought, and instilled these principles into them to the extent that they could be frank and free and democratic with him and one another. The morale of this élite scientific group can still be detected as a positive force in Russian science. Nevertheless, he was damnably intolerant. A first impression of ‘pathology’, in an idea or a ...”

“... little essays are an admirable reminder that the RSC’s standards have always been based on a close study of the words. David Suchet convincingly shows that his human rather than fishy, black but not monstrous Caliban was a perfectly logical reading, in defiance of grand and inhuman Calibans stretching back to Beerbohm Tree, who, taking his name too ...”

“... intimately and earnestly, their heavy shoulders tensed over their drinks. Naturally I edged up close to Chiv and Big Mal, hoping to hear – what? Fluent, allusive talk of set-pieces, short corners, long throw-ins, one-against-one situations, professional fouls, banana kicks. What I heard went something like this. ‘The more you learn, the more you ...”

“... Fella, there is a group photograph of the entire Modern Movement in architecture (the lot, bar Frank Lloyd Wright and Mies van der Rohe), and there’s Jim, modestly in the back row but practically in the middle. The progress (or retreat) of the Modern Movement in architecture from its Thirties role as a revolutionary cadre of the Popular Front to its ...”

“... she forced her patients to swallow the skin on their hot milk. To distant friends, for she had no close ones, she wrote vigorous letters, and especially to Oswald Faringdon, widowed father of two small boys, far off in Egypt. ‘I wonder how you would care for life out here?’ he wrote, intending speculation but absent-mindedly posing a question ...”

“... Guggenheim as the flagship of a resuscitated Bilbao that it spent £96 million of public funds on Frank Gehry’s building, use of the Guggenheim name, access to the Guggenheim collection and a few Guggenheim pieces with which to start its own. The Basque Autonomous Government, helped by a trust fund of private companies, will also foot the bill for the ...”

“... it is just finished. It has been too long in the making to have the freshness of something like Frank Gehry’s Bilbao Guggenheim. It would be absurd to make this a reason for underestimating its old-fashioned virtues: there are things which were done better then. And political questions remain to which no clear answer can be expected: will it be finished ...”