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“... Here is an anthology of pieces drawn from published hooks on life in Scotland, mostly memoirs and mostly familiar to historians. Old friends include George Robertson, Joseph Mitchell, Thomas Somerville and Ramsay of Ochtertyre. The accounts are separated into themes, such as school, factory and mine, leisure, crime (though none of the memorialists claim active participation in this ...”

“... present, bronze on a tall plinth – His plain Victorian three-piece suit bulks large, Befitting Sydney’s first successful exporter Of refrigerated foods – while, lower down This plush declivity, one finds a bubbler Superfluously shaded by a small But intricate gun-metal baldacchino, Sure-footed as a Donatello font. Thus in a sculpture court less ...”

“... that befitted a burgeoning colony. Today the site is the forecourt of the new Museum of Sydney, with the ghostly floor-plan of the original residence picked out in white on the granite flagstones. At its perimeter, adjoining a row of Victorian terraces once used for Customs and Immigration, stand 29 pillars of sandstone, steel, I-beam and ...”

“... of a saw-toothed roofline on the Olympic logo, and the world knew which city staged the games. Sydney Opera House is the only 20th-century building that has become a city’s icon – Big Ben, Miss Liberty and the Eiffel Tower date from the 19th – and may well rank with Hagia Sophia and the Taj Mahal as our era’s legacy to the ages. How did an ...”

“... director award at Cannes in 2011 and Only God Forgives has already been named best film at the Sydney Film Festival. Like many artists keen on violence, Refn has a sentimental side. He worries about children even as he shows us more ripped and smashed human bodies than several years’ worth of newsreels. You can see why Refn wanted Ryan Gosling to play ...”

“... it is more troublingly figured as actively damaging rather than merely dreary.Larkin’s father, Sydney, met his mother, Eva Day, in the summer of 1906 in Rhyl in North Wales. She was twenty, and on holiday with her parents; he was two years older, and on a cycling tour. Although both were extremely shy, they were also attracted to each other as opposites ...”

“... coups, a wire-walk between the towers of Notre-Dame, and the same thing between the pillars of the Sydney Harbour Bridge. The wonderful word ‘funambule’ is used several times, evoking the famous 19th-century Théâtre des Funambules and its appearance in Les Enfants du Paradis. The word means what it says, bringing together the Latin terms for ...”

“... quite different things. Barcelona is now a city of nearly four million inhabitants, the size of Sydney and Los Angeles, as Hughes says. The mention of Sydney is not an accident, since one of Barcelona’s appeals for Hughes is that it is ‘provincial’, an attraction ‘no doubt ... involved’, he says, ‘on a ...”

“... a tough dramatic alloy, delicate and robust at once: This paint was from Raphaelson’s, a small Sydney outfit who are amongst the best pigment makers in the world. In the five years I had been really famous I would use nothing else and now they had some new, very serious acrylic greens: permanent green, earth green, Jenkins green, titanium green, Prussian ...”

“... years later the grandmother of another Frank – Frank Gehry (b.1929) – poured out a pile of wood scraps for him to make things with. Today you can see him in Sydney Pollack’s documentary Sketches of Frank Gehry cutting and bending sheets of card and sticking them together to make models – inventing on the fly like ...”

“... and Fleance, looks out of the window: ‘Light thickens, and the crow/Makes wing to th’ rooky wood.’ The milieu’s ominousness reflects his current mood and supplies a further reason to act on it.The scene from Macbeth is the prime example of the creation of atmosphere provided by William Empson in Seven Types of Ambiguity. Empson had his suspicions ...”

“... ill and like getting old, who prefer winter to summer and autumn to spring’. These Babes in the Wood crave the rainy, stained and soggy. Yet the later Murdoch was a hard-line Tory, who may well have been liberal in her aesthetics but was hardly so in her politics. She had right-wing views on most topics, and lambasted the work of Derrida while having only ...”

“... had considered Angus, nor did they now. She got out the bottle of ink, and the pen with the cherry wood handle, which they shared, and began the letter.’ Loyalty, destructive here, often takes unexpected forms. In the passages included from Cranford, Miss Jenkyns, the elder sister, has long ago destroyed Miss Matty’s happiness by dissuading her from ...”

“... triumphantly, in my view – into poetry. Brennan’s background was the Irish famine. In Sydney he grew up speaking the language of the oppressor. But as a young Catholic with a failure for a father he had one conspicuous advantage among his handicaps. He was educated by the Jesuits of Riverview, who even in my time were still making sure that their ...”

“... and fell into the middle of the room with me underneath it. I knew the face framed by that rickety wood. I’d seen it before, in that frame, and I knew who it was: my grandfather Michael. I knew that’s who it was though I’d never met him. The grandfather was covered in dust and damp patches dried in. But that was him: he had the darkest eyes I’d ever ...”