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“... a girl called Mary, beginning when she was six. She is standing with her family in a cold Suffolk field – Tremain often revisits Suffolk – trying to observe two minutes’ silence for the funeral of George VI. The time is extended by her father’s inability to judge time by his faulty watch. Like most of the characters, the father is pretty odd; unlike ...”

“... allows some nice perceptions: we kept still and watched their motorcycle patrols the flash of field glasses like stammering lighthouses at high noon as dogs tied to the doors of deserted farms howled old testament howls swollenuddered cows bellowed a French cavalryman shot a line of horses one by one I knew we were finished then A survivor manages to get ...”

“... proscription of not un-: ‘a not unblack dog chasing a not unsmall rabbit across a not ungreen field’. The last of his rules for good writing states that none of the others should apply if barbarism resulted: but there was in him a strain that was, if not barbarous, then barbarian. It emerged in his life. We read of him lashing out at tiresome Burmese ...”

“... Field’s VN: The Life and Art of Vladimir Nabokov is a biography which can make one wonder what biography is all about. On the face of it, the book marks the end of a tempestuous literary love affair. As his publishers proclaim, Field has devoted his professional life to the study of Nabokov ...”

“... For many people, Frank Gehry is not only our master architect but our master artist as well. In the current retrospective which is about to transfer from the Guggenheim in New York to the one in Bilbao, he is often called a genius without a blush of embarrassment (Thomas Krens, Guggenheim director and Gehry ‘collaborator’, can’t get enough of the word ...”

“... save the pedestals – they always come in handy’ (Stanislaw Lec). Love is another rich field, dominated by Proust (‘It is seldom indeed that one parts on good terms, because if one were on good terms one would not part’), but with good contributions from Walter Benjamin, and from the dependable Emerson: ‘Love is the bright foreigner, the ...”

“... you see’ is as simple as it sounds – whether Conrad wasn’t affected by the larger semantic field of verbs meaning ‘see’ in the Slavic languages. As to the ‘real world’, Watt has much to say about the Conradian admiration for ‘solidarity’, pointing out affinities with Tönnies and Durkheim, whom Conrad had almost certainly not read, and ...”

“... and coloured seen from close up, yet when viewed from a distance the whole becomes the image of a field of flowers. It is the very inadequacy of the brush strokes themselves that shows the emergence of the painting to be a result of their organisation. Analogously, individual atoms can form an organised whole which can do things that individual atoms, or even ...”

“... dukedom, partly because of the divinatory powers that had enabled him to choose me, from a field of candidates all manifestly much better qualified than I, for a job at King’s College, Newcastle, part of the University of Durham, of which he was at that time the rector. He had been a Conservative MP and briefly a young cabinet minister; great things ...”

“... not only him but the Home Rule cause of the moral dignity he had battled to assert, and, as Frank Callanan notes, delivered to Unionist enemies the propaganda gift of an apparent reversion to the old, burlesque Ireland, the pantomimic Paddyism, of their most cherished prejudices, an image only intensified by Davitt’s snivelling exculpation of the ...”

“... Storey’ and readers of my (and his) generation will recall the final shot of This Sporting Life: Frank Machin (Richard Harris), mired, spavined, raising himself on the rugby field to lurch back into hopeless battle. His life as a professional is over. Football chews up its workforce faster even than the pits. But Arthur ...”

“... clear room, plain desk, The hand, symbol of power, Here the veins may pour Into the deed, as the field Into the standing corn. The simple machinery is here Clear room clear day clear desk And the hand with its power To make the heart pour Into the word, as the sun Moves upward through the corn. This same poem tells us that lucidity is holy, and these ...”

“... the newest phase of Modern architecture tries to project rational methods from the technical field out to human and psychological fields.’ A change of the sort he seems to be adumbrating did not, in any general way, take place (although St John Wilson is able to devote a paragraph to a worldwide roll-call of Aalto’s followers and admirers). But in ...”

“... schoolfellows make allowances for him. Aitken, in the Hughes novel, complains about the travesty Frank Richards made of his character – obese he may have been, obtuse never. There’s the History Prize he won in 1910 to testify to his possession of actual brains in place of the low cunning ascribed to Bunter. It may also be meant to remind us of Aitken’s ...”

“... like Cooper by the wonderful Kyle McLachlan), hooked by the snipped-off human ear he finds in a field, exemplifies this curiosity which, in fiction, so often impels the innocent to look into the criminal underworld. His nice blonde girlfriend Sandy wishes he wouldn’t, but, as he says, ‘I’m seeing something that was always hidden. I’m involved in a ...”