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“... second book; I don’t know the first, The Notebook of Gismondo Cavaletti, but it won the David Higham Prize and is described in a Nina Bawden review quoted on the flap of the new one as ‘confident’. In the Dark has all the marks of a brave but not altogether confident search for something different to say. Few novels have been written about ...”

“... works even intimate invisibility or blindness, as in the murky Diver (1962-63) and Periscope (Hart Crane) (1963), where they are also associated with watery suicide.As this art looks at itself, it folds back on itself: it develops by recursion, by ‘repetition and recombination’, as Rothkopf puts it. Johns first juxtaposes motifs within a painting, then ...”

“... make language flow and shine. He comes back, again and again, to a single quotation from the poet David Lunde; one that Griffin, believe it or not, stumbles on while browsing through the racks of Beaucoup Books on Magazine Street: ‘We must learn to put our distress systems into code.’ There it is every time, in every book, the great theme that underlies ...”

“... The Western Canon, as though its author – and its editor, since the book has been assembled by David Mikics from pieces written over the past half-century – was provoked by the reaction to his earlier book into seeing a wider world of writing. There are chapters on black authors (Ralph Ellison, Zora Neale Hurston, Toni Morrison, James Baldwin, Robert ...”

“... in sequence, such images ‘tell a story’. In The Jewel in the Crown we have the image of Miss Crane, the missionary teacher, holding the hand of her dead Indian assistant, killed by rioters; the image of Daphne Manners running and running through the night streets, not so much escaping from what has happened to her as trying to rejoin it, to rejoin the ...”

“... In​ the early 1960s, David Hockney made a series of etchings inspired by the poems of Constantine Cavafy; he went to Egypt to discover the places Cavafy had drunk coffee and picked up lovers, but in the images it’s mainly Hockney’s own life and friends who figure. The etchings touch on rapture, and the frankness of their erotic pleasure at the sight and memory of boys in bed brought Cavafy to a new, wide readership ...”

“... have gone so far as to theorise into a whole new mode of production, and which is celebrated in David Lindsay’s detective story, An Absence of Light, a product of American mass culture, in the following terms: The age of the personal computer had brought about a sea-change in the private investigation and intelligence business. Now anyone who could ...”

“... Naples; and a decade since the first Aids fiction started to show up: Robert Ferro’s Second Son, David B. Feinberg’s Eighty-Sixed, Allen Barnett’s beautiful The Body and Its Dangers. Today, as a result of political pressure as well as recognition of a growing gay readership, gay sections can be found in most bookshop chains, and independent gay ...”

“... iced water, was a quotation labouring to attain a modicum of reality. Not so much a dry David Hockney splash as Richard Wilson’s site-specific installation 20:50: his tank of sump oil, miraculously transubstantiated into this brilliant new substance, a liquid thicker than jelly but lighter than air. A seductive mosaic carpet across which you ...”

“... but the ship itself was realised by others. In Glasgow, John Robertson made the engine and David Napier the boiler, while John Wood in Port Glasgow built the wooden hull and installed the machinery. The result was a marvel, the prototype of a steamer fleet that would revolutionise travel on the Clyde by 1820, when two dozen of them sailed every day ...”

“... person within.’ (Hoyer is the editor of Elbe’s own notes and diaries, not to be confused with David Ebershoff, on whose ghastly novel The Danish Girl is based.) Jan Morris defines her transition as a journey on the path to identity: ‘I had reached Identity’; Ashley speaks of her desire ‘to be whole’, and her ‘great sense of purpose to make ...”

“... each truck relying on a single headlamp, hooded, veiled and tilted sharply down. The drivers crane forward, noses to the windscreen, as they try to make out the road ahead and the blocky outline of the gun and limber immediately in front.Crossing the Somme, the convoy entered the territory of mass graves commemorating the fallen of the Great War in the ...”