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“... some roadworks: a guy in a front-end loader was laying down a line of inch-thick, six-foot-long steel plates. He would pick up a stack of half a dozen in his bucket, then reverse while raising the lift arms, so that the rectangles fell neatly end to end. It was balletic; it was a card trick; it was industrial. It was totally Richard Serra. The artist ...”

“... There is a hangar at JFK Airport – Hangar 17 – where, until recently, about 1200 pieces of steel and other objects from the World Trade Center site were warehoused. In the frenetic days after the attacks, these remains were selected as tokens of 9/11, so that they might be dispersed to memorials around the US, foremost among them the National September 11 Memorial and Museum at Ground Zero, which opens on the tenth anniversary of the event ...”

“... Charles Ray’s​ life-sized Young Man, machine-milled in 2012 from a solid stainless-steel block, is meant, Ray says, ‘to move forwards and backwards in increasingly irrelevant time’. The phrase is less opaque than it seems. His ambition was to make a kouros, but one modelled on the body of a long-time Los Angeles friend ...”

“... camp and shove off. The act with the glitterball, that’s my favourite, when I’m up in that steel star swirling sixty spins a minute for a full two minutes, and that glitterball’s spattering silver stars over my body until I’m almost imaginary. Dazzling. What’s hardest is a hurt, sprains say, crying cramped in the caravan for weeks overhearing ...”

“... David Smith is often seen as the Jackson Pollock of modern sculpture, the artist who transformed European innovations (in welded steel above all) into an American idiom of expanded scale and expressive power. Like most legends in art history, this isn’t false, despite the immediate catch that his greatest follower, Anthony Caro, is English ...”

“... coloured or frosted), electric wires, slabs of granite, cast-iron, hardboard, fibreglass, plaster, steel, bronze, aluminium, limestone, lapis lazuli, serpentine, ceramic, a bicycle, marble, sandblasted porcelain, cement, polyester, polystyrene, tufa, wax, volcanic ash and a mosaic of plastic dice used as an epidermis. Cragg’s sculptures are responses to ...”

“... own presidential stature and coat-tails, as well as his incomparable political intelligence. David Steel might, just conceivably, be capable of playing such a role, but Labour would never accept Liberal leadership of a joint Opposition campaign. Which means one is left with Neil Kinnock – who is incapable of playing such a role. Kinnock may be a ...”

“... sunburnt in a short-sleeved shirt, eyeing a boulder among clean-shaven cliffs and curls of old steel hawser, and soaring white-faced mountains, has drawn me to this place. On the terrace outside our cottage, the shiny black delta-shapes of carpenter bees have been flashing about among the blossoming rosemary from ten o’clock each morning. Up at 5000 ...”

“... the machinist who wears a hat saying ‘US Male’ and smokes big cigars and weight-lifts steel bars and arbors while his machine runs. The poet is smiling when he remarks that ‘being a man in a machine shop is not easy.’ This is the sort of punchline towards which Voss is always moving; and it works, when it does, because he has an instinctive ...”

“... to be gaining a presence not just in politics but in pop culture too. That same month, May 1976, David Bowie was photographed at Victoria Station on his return to Britain after two years in North America. Standing in an open-topped Mercedes, he appeared to give his fans some kind of open-handed, straight-armed – possibly fascist – salute. Soon afterwards ...”

“... name to put about can be a proper asset and, in this, Heritage has served a purpose. How Sir David Steel came to sit on the board of directors, alongside Buckingham, is not a matter of public record. It is possible that one of his former research assistants, Andrew Gifford, who is also on the board of Heritage, was the link. Gifford has family and ...”

“... Australians), they seem to have been unembarrassable. Yet that’s not how it worked over here. David Laws’s 22 Days in May, which recounts the negotiations that preceded the formation of the coalition government from the inside, explains how it happened that in our case the winners actually ended up winning. Hardly surprisingly, it’s not that Lib Dem ...”

“... these non-stop flyers mate on the wing is something for which, according to the chief authorities (David Lack and Derek Bromhall), there is no firm evidence. I have watched them for nearly sixty years, at home in North-East Scotland and Westmorland, in the Dolomites and on Gibraltar, and from high up on the Blouberg in Transvaal, and their closest intimacy was ...”

“... scar. How can the celebrity outsider maintain a sense of his identity, or painterly authority, when he is his own subject-matter and his audience sees that subject-matter as ‘other’, less than ‘us’? Basquiat’s solutions to this dilemma are often brilliant. In the triptych Zydeco (1984), for example, a cinematographer in profile looks through the lens of his movie camera ...”

“... Not to exhale one white word. Silence starved the furnace. Dad’s coal-heart cindered. The steel face flickered, lit lightly, pistons heaving on heavy wheels. Huff Huff as his engine snored on its sleepers. There were no more trains that night. Hiding. Not speaking. Habits grafting to a character that’s there, that’s not there – that shared ...”