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“... idling. Like the new movie itself, we have our memories, and Tobey Maguire is still with us as Peter Parker, the goofiness wearing a little thin, but the earnestness holding up (in Spider-Man 2 the woman Peter loves appears in a Broadway production of The Importance of Being Earnest), and he does something very few ...”

“... Certainly, to read a collection like The Oxford Book of Narrative Verse, newly-edited by Iona and Peter Opie, is to be reminded of the powerful appeal that’s made in poetry by ‘the kind of story in which, you want to know what happens next’. The Opies’ choice is often cautious and occasionally perverse. In some respects, moreover, their book belongs ...”

“... very English painter, a practitioner of the restraint and charm that English art in the 1960s was keen to distance itself from, but which – in Hockney’s drawings, for example – keeps breaking through. The minimalism of the reliefs that gave Nicholson a claim to the title of England’s most thorough Modernist was not, like the Russian work it bears some ...”

“... commerce that it generated over the three centuries from 1200 to 1500, provide the themes for Peter Spufford’s splendid book. Spufford’s magisterial study Money and Its Use in Medieval Europe (1988) laid the foundations for this larger project; it is the fruit of extensive further research, both in the archives and on the ground, following the routes ...”

“... by a sentimental fit, take down this book and blow the dust off it recalling: ‘Bosley was quite keen on me.’ What on earth were they looking for – Ted Hughes and Philip Larkin, Seamus Heaney and Charles Causley – that they should have rated Bosley’s heart-warming dexterity (feelingful as well as formal) below, for instance, 18 solid unpunctuated ...”

“... The trouble is, Millais’s judgment, in whatever spirit it was made, has been that of posterity. Peter Funnell’s essay in the catalogue of the exhibition now at the National Portrait Gallery quotes Arthur Symons, writing in 1896, a few months after Millais’s death: ‘a finer promise than any artist of his time’ was wasted. His later pictures were done ...”

“... it would seem, for the session to be over, may be the composer Luigi Boccherini (Don Luis was keen on music as well as on hunting and science). The man smiling out at us, like a child looking to catch the eye of a parent when he should be attending to his part in the school play, is Boccherini’s constant companion the violinist Manfredi or (a less ...”

“... fanfare, like an elephant cry. At nightfall in this quarry a few kilometres outside Avignon, Peter Brook’s staging of Jean-Claude Carrière’s adaptation of The Mahabharata begins. Wisdom-book and story-repository, fifteen times the size of the Bible, The Mahabharata was written in Sanskrit, but the words you hear are French, spoken with a piquant ...”

“... towards botany and zoology as physics and astronomy. It was named after both Lyncaeus, ‘the most keen-eyed of the Argonauts’, and the lynx – a small, sharp-eyed creature (even if it looks more fierce than far-seeing in the woodcut that appears on the Galilean and other Lincean title pages). Cassiano’s ‘paper museum’ – drawings of antiquities ...”

“... one thinking how far buildings can, like clothes, be worn for effect, not comfort. The Prince is keen on preservation of the old urban textures. He is also keen on the Rod Hackney do-it-yourself concept of Community Architecture. The implication of Hutchinson’s comments on the second of these princely enthusiasms is that ...”

“... his employer because uneducated Muslims like him are being manipulated by Babangida’s cronies, keen to stir up inter-ethnic hatred to legitimise perpetual military government and maintain private oil revenues. This mimics the endlessly postponed democracy put forward by Lord Lugard, governor-general of Nigeria, in his Dual Mandate in British Tropical ...”

“... ones and a dingy backyard. The last possible direction to take was down. Town planners, always keen to preserve profiles and details, presumably worry less about new basements than new UPVC glazing bars. It used to seem to me that terraced houses were infinitely adaptable. But after reading Rasmussen I came to believe that the changes from dwelling house ...”

“... and hat, and in another illustration he is taking tea with aunts whom Lartigue would have been keen to snap. In his guides to British architecture (Pillar to Post and Homes Sweet Homes), the excesses of the latest thing are identified. The story advances spread by illustrated spread, so that ‘Early English’ and ‘Modernistic’ get the same degree of ...”

“... unaggressive; both, the sharp highlights suggest, damp-eyed), seems to listen to you quietly, keen to agree, to conciliate, perhaps even to persuade you to improve your ways.The portraits attended to, one turns to the ‘fancy pictures’ (country scenes, pictures of poor children) and landscapes: not dismissively, like the London sitters who passed the ...”

“... again.’ Which makes you think about sitting and standing self-portraits: Hogarth sitting – keen, you feel, to get closer to the canvas. Velázquez in Las Meninas standing – clearly needing to move back to see how his latest mark is working. In Freud’s later, freer pictures the puckering of cheek or belly is described by marks which strongly ...”