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“... remember that in the 1960s ambitious art could still justify its reliance on painting (rather than light works or earthworks or sheer emptiness) precisely because it was the medium most able to concretise the contemporary image world: Foster does not make this mistake. Nor does he fail to see that the 1960s painters were well aware of the way their pictorial ...”

“... which institutions work to protect themselves from challenge or change. The feminist philosopher Alison Phipps has written that complaints made in the context of the contemporary university, with its clearly defined market objectives, are subject to a process of ‘reckoning up’: a calculation of the cost and benefit to the institution of each course of ...”

“... is called for the vice-president almost immediately fails. The call-back felt like ‘a flood of light had burst into the apartment on St Paul Street and caught us out.’ The sadness of the defeated Democrats has flooded Keith’s story; it seeps, too, into Mark’s and Sam’s. Sam starts out luckier, seeming to know what the moment is about already and ...”

“... Les Années eventually came out in 2008 in France (and as The Years in the English translation by Alison Strayer, published in 2018). She became more famous still, the first living woman to have her work appear in the Gallimard Quarto series (the cooler younger sister of the Pléiade), nominated for the Man Booker International, winner of the Marguerite ...”

“... for long distances, instead going via centres of population). Ultimately, however, the speed of light is an insuperable barrier. If Einstein is right, no message is ever going to get from Chicago to Mahwah in less than four milliseconds. The solution is what’s called ‘colocation’: placing the computer systems on which your algorithms run next to the ...”

“... in something of a swoon at the heavenliness on offer. ‘People want to be interested,’ said Alison Austin, a technical adviser, ‘you’ve just got to capture their imagination.’ We were standing by the sandwiches and the takeaway hot foods lined up in front of the whooshing doors. Alison swept her hand over the ...”

“... I hung around with in my pre-teen years were always losing the head. During the good weather, the light nights, what started off as a game of rounders or crazy golf would end up as a game of clubbing the neighbour’s cat to death. A night of camping on the playing-fields could usually be turned into an opportunity for the wrecking of vegetable gardens, or ...”

“... floor; rooms are flexible with partitions and folding doors; skylights and louvres admit natural light into the darkest corners; tambour-fronted furniture allows cupboards to slide open; drawers and chair backs pivot. Goldfinger’s architectural apprenticeship in interiors and furniture design served him, and his now growing family, well. With Willow ...”

“... Nabokov ‘had a flypaper feel for words’, according to Alison Bishop, who knew him at Cornell when she was a child. He might, therefore, have relished his biographer coming mildly unstuck in the course of this otherwise tenacious, intricately argued, judicious account of Nabokov’s life in the States, and, post-Lolita, in Montreux ...”

“... quatrain, or break up the quatrains into couplets in quizzical dialogue with each other – as Alison Brackenbury does in her mischievous sonnet of 2004 called ‘Homework. Write a Sonnet. About Love?’ When poets have written about the sonnet they have tended to represent it as a small orderly space. Samuel Daniel is often quoted as having said: ‘is it ...”

“... wing of the IG was represented by the team of Paolozzi, Henderson and the architects Peter and Alison Smithson, who littered a bare shed on a rough patio with symbolic relics (it looked as though it had been ‘excavated after the atomic holocaust’, the critic Reyner Banham remarked). On the proto-Pop side of the IG were Hamilton, John McHale and the ...”

“... these events, as she does of all events. She is a very able researcher; she does not always have a light touch. Her biography is designed to be more even-handed than Doris Langley Moore’s, which was peppered with moral judgments, but her view of Nesbit as a ‘woman of passion’ is a cherishing one – and her commentary does not have the spice of her more ...”

“... wizards call unmagical humans. This aspect of the story is familiar from mythological literature. Alison Lurie, praising the Harry Potter books in the New York Review of Books, saw in them ‘the common childhood fantasy that the dreary adults and siblings you live with are not your real family, that you are somehow special and gifted’. Freud called this ...”

“... shockingly urban for its outer-suburban context’. Hatherley is even more ensorcelled by Alison and Peter Smithson’s béton brut behemoth, Robin Hood Gardens in East London (shown above). For him the Smithsons are the real heroes, and a half-century on he reprises Reyner Banham – with dialectical knobs on – by placing them and their fellow New ...”

“... the blood. It erupts like a protest or insurrection, a fleeting moment of lucidity. Seen in this light, the novel could be issuing a warning, or asking a question that is driving many responses to the world laid bare by Covid-19. Under what conditions can the truth of social deprivation be seen? ‘The lockdown worked like a chemical experiment that suddenly ...”