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“... else can only be known by getting inside and asking questions. Tracking down a Sullivan Bank or a Frank Lloyd Wright house in its native habitat, seeing the physical context of buildings which also have an art-historical context: these are pleasures and an education. The assumptions which the taxonomy of style and the hierarchies of art history underpin can ...”

“... the heroisms. The Chorus leaders of Dogskin likewise speak of uncovering a crime: When the green field comes off like a lid Revealing what was much better hid. The ideal location for such a crime, according to ‘The Guilty Vicarage’, is a greenfield site in rural England exactly like Pressan Ambo, ‘the closely knit geographical group (the old world ...”

“... was replaced by semi-abstraction. This was followed by Abstract Expressionism, then by colour-field painting, conceptual art and land art. As each step can seem a wilful rejection of complexity and richness, the reasons for the moves Irwin made must justify as well as explain. Set out in Weschler’s book (much of it is direct quotation from interviews ...”

“... research’ in the countryside around Chartres, Soutine found a peasant woman in a field, whom he persuaded to stand in a small pool for days on end while he worked. Even when a storm broke out he refused to let the woman move. ‘The rain fell, the thunder rolled … but Soutine went on working. At last he came to his senses and was surprised ...”

“... he missed the early, heroic years of the resistance, he was ideally placed to observe, both in the field and at headquarters, the growing self-confidence of the Partisans, the increasing tension between them and their Western allies, and their growing reluctance to take part in any operations that were not specifically intended both to increase their grip on ...”

“... she feared most ‘were the Marines in fatigues who sometimes stopped by on their way from the field – smelling like water buffalo, unshaven, with weapons and the reflection of death in their eyes. To me they were as terrible as the “slash-faced” Moroccans who loomed out of the trees like giants 13 years before.’ A foreign service officer named ...”

“... became OSS’s benefactor, training its agents at Camp X in Canada and working with them in the field, a legacy that would shift the focus of OSS’s successor agency, the CIA, away from the humdrum routine of intelligence-gathering towards action.Scott Anderson recounts the careers of four OSS agents whose underground war against the Axis turned into a ...”

“... book in a long line of strange attempts to stretch and warp the parameters of writing. As a field it’s disparate and hard to summarise, easier to define through what it doesn’t do than what it does. These are works that don’t create fictional worlds or try to represent reality. Instead they ‘reflect upon and performatively test the ...”

“... Education: The New Crisis of Adult Authority in the Classroom’, based on the book by Frank Furedi, out that same weekend.1 ‘We’, apparently, were ‘very excited’ when ‘we’ realised Furedi’s book was being launched at the same time as the Battle of Ideas; Furedi is ‘one of the UK’s, indeed Europe’s, indeed the world’s leading ...”

“... enquire whose soul dangles from his watch-chain That deliberately naive opening line could be Frank O’Hara (and probably signals an important O’Hara source); but the lower-case voice of the little nobody, the Chaplinesque charmer, together with the strong cartoon-image of Success (boots and a watch-chain), half-conceal, without spoiling its ...”

“... found it easy to believe or hard to resist. Later in this book, Hughes cannot resist relating how Frank Packer (‘the gross and meat-fisted capitalist who owned Australian Consolidated Press’) calmed the anxieties of a new secretary he’d seduced by offering her a black aniseed jelly bean as an oral contraceptive, even though he admits that ‘of course ...”

“... architects on this West Coast gravy train are, predictably, those consummate exterior decorators Frank Gehry and Thomas Heatherwick. They are unlikely to cede control to the rodents inhabiting their bespoke boxes which plainly derive from the biospheres and domes of the late 1960s and 1970s. Those are among the more feasible, more tested, hence more ...”

“... buildings.The Pritzker Prize juries (this year’s was headed by Lord Rothschild and included Frank Gehry, who won the prize in 1989) have, over the years, chosen a significant number of winners (Gehry, Rem Koolhaas and now Hadid) whose reputations, at the time of the award, depended to a great extent on small buildings or on their contributions to a ...”

“... account of Nabokov’s life in the States, and, post-Lolita, in Montreux. Disposing of Andrew Field, his predecessor in the field, Brian Boyd cites his insolent, perfunctory response to one of Nabokov’s factual corrections. Told an event had taken place in July and not on ‘a wet autumnal day’, ...”

“... as the quantity of this commentary is the diversity of critical approach. Trollope would seem, in Frank Kermode’s phrase, a ‘patient’ author, capable of absorbing all new lines of analysis. As well as orthodox readings of a literary-critical or literary-historical kind which the subject could himself have read without perplexity (for example, those by ...”