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“... of his aunts in Columbus, Ohio. If Keillor had not said goodbye to his fictional home town of Lake Wobegon quite as irrevocably as, say, Hemingway had shaken off the dust of Oak Park, Illinois, he was at least in a position to say hullo to John Updike in the office corridor. He had put enough mileage between himself and his origins to achieve ...”

“... her face. Bright light does not discover, but drives away beauty. A moon-watching picnic on the lake is destroyed by the electric light on the shore. Kabuki theatre becomes crude when white faces and gaudy costumes are flooded with light. The force of Tanizaki’s elegy for the old is made the more powerful by his perception that the new is unavoidable: he ...”

“... isn’t quite the point. Nor should the fact that Coleridge might well have met a tourist on a Lake District mountaintop make one question the intensity of his embrace of the landscape. (A ‘lean expressive-faced man’ came upon him on Skiddaw, after Coleridge had scribbled ‘with a bit of slate my name among the other names’. The man exclaimed, after ...”

“... departure has made monotone what was polychrome, are indigo (blue), gamboge (yellow) and brown lake (purple).Thomas Girtin was born in 1775 and died at 27, perhaps of asthma, although nameless dissipation and even sitting sketching on cold ground have been given as possible causes of death. What he achieved in his short life shows how various the tasks ...”

“... the negative sense, such as Nesterov’s excursions into myth (Dual Harmony – a couple by a swan lake) and religion (St Sergius of Radonezh). These are boring because they are too far from the spirit of what they try to evoke.The easiest pictures to enjoy are examples of fresh, direct observation, works which if not actually painted in the open air must draw ...”

“... and to inherent instability. Moctezuma’s city, Tenochtitlan, occupied an island in the shallow lake that once spread across the basin of Mexico on the site of what is now Mexico City. When Cortés arrived in November 1519 the island population may have numbered as many as 200,000. The city was rich, supplied with staples from surrounding territories and ...”

“... people think he is a god. Latona, travelling with her twins, Apollo and Diana, stops to drink at a lake in Lycia. Peasants on the shore prevent her getting to the water and mock her. She turns them into frogs. Tobias, travelling with his dog and his guardian, the archangel Raphael, is attacked by a great fish while washing in the Tigris. The angel tells him to ...”

“... from vibrant blue to pale yellow; three have a rocky hill, distant buildings and a reflecting lake; all include dark evergreen foliage against which naked figures stand out. And the figures – above all the pale young women, sometimes Eve, sometimes Venus, sometimes another deity – are standard too. Cranach Girl is an ideal female type, more ...”

“... to say, Mies’s American work: the Illinois Institute of Technology buildings, the Lake Shore Drive Apartments in Chicago, the Farnsworth House in Plano, Illinois, the Seagram Building) could later rise.What America could not supply were patrons to match Fritz and Grete Tugendhat. The Farnsworth House led to recriminations from the client, and ...”

“... will ring bells for anyone who has visited the great monastic centres there and elsewhere around Lake Constance. In this small, quiet, sunny spot in the foothills of the Alps all the sources of Carolingian culture, both literary and artistic, had been concentrated by the mid-ninth century. ‘As a symbol of the monastic refuge, which sheltered this culture ...”

“... marked by suffering and loss, there are moments of imagined tranquillity, as when two rowers on a lake wish, for the two swans they have disturbed – and perhaps, implicitly, for themselves – a quiet lake, where only their own reflections glide between them on the water. And there are epiphanies of grace, of ...”

“... speaking his mind, getting it wrong sometimes, looking on the bright side, and staying involved. Peter Matthiessen, the accomplished author of numerous books of travel and of wry and terrible tales of violence on remote frontiers, perhaps also considers himself a friend of Africa. He loves to be there and incessantly returns: there are many things in Africa ...”

“... on the road, and ‘the asparagus-like stench’ of a run-over skunk. On a holiday at Garnet Lake near New York the food goes mysteriously bad, bloated horseflies and red ants share the bedroom, and the nearest farm breeds vermin –‘a whole mess of crawling, flying, stinging filth’. The division between desire and talent colours so much of the book ...”

“... the author as he grapples with new and alien surroundings. The Sportsman’s Restaurant in Eagle Lake, Texas, with ducks dangling from the ceiling fans and a stained-glass angel carrying a lamb. The horde of model tortoises collected by Eleanor, his hostess, made from wood and glass and brass and steel and bean-bags, tortoises with zips and tortoise ...”

“... We were all friends, I suppose. You may not remember Graham, but he was Maureen’s first husband, Peter and Jill’s father . . . you do, that’s good. They were Surrey people: they had a grand house in Caterham. Graham was a rich fellow, talented, energetic, generous; he’d made most of his money as a printer: he published the daily stock exchange ...”