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“... the cinema-owners; the idiocy involved in cutting films down, etc.’ An essay from 1976 praising Robert Altman’s Nashville begins with two and a half pages of honest rage at the philistine state of German film criticism, which has dwindled to the status of the listings guide. ‘As this sort of criticism writes about films only as something that you ...”

“... 1915). And he may be the only 20th-century reader of The Biography of Elder Brown Warren Stone written by himself, with Additions and Reflections by Elder John Rogers (Cincinnati, 1847). He describes the way you could make out the shape of his uncle’s toes through the leather of his shoes. He evokes the prosperous farming community of Lincoln ...”

“... to dazzle the eyes and divert the imagination of the vulgar – Here a wooden lion, there a stone statue; in one place, a range of things like coffee-house boxes, covered a-top; in another, a parcel of ale-house benches; in a third, a puppet-shew representation of a tin cascade; in a fourth, a gloomy cave of a circular form, like a sepulchral vault half ...”

“... of a Mrs Bennet or an Emma, Sophia Ainger the vicar’s wife does her best to manoeuvre Rupert Stone-bird into the arms of sister Penelope. Her expedients include a dinner party at the vicarage, the Christmas bazaar, an excursion to Rome after Easter for the parish stalwarts. Stonebird proves as impervious as his name, or rather begins to develop instead a ...”

“... lastyear of the great forerunner’s life. Stieglitz’s face has a weary look not unlike that of Robert Flaherty, father of the documentary film, another great forerunner whose portrait Cartier-Bresson took in the same year. A similar weariness infuses the faces of Georges Rouault and Pierre Bonnard in their 1944 portraits; but the relationship between these ...”

“... in evolution about which opinion was divided but not generally hostile. It was 15 years since Robert Chambers had caused a sensation with the anonymous publication of his Vestiges of the Natural History of Creation. Prince Albert read it aloud to Queen Victoria, and in his novel Tancred, where it features as The Revelations of Chaos, Disraeli parodied ...”

“... went on to be Trump’s national security adviser – had made indiscreet comments to a Rolling Stone reporter about the inadequacies of Joe Biden, Richard Holbrooke and Obama himself. Despite Flynn’s later contempt for Hillary Clinton – he led the chants of ‘lock her up’ at the Republican National Convention – she was well liked by ...”

“... at the bottom of the river while the scene unfolding on the bank slowly enters the wood and stone of the bridge above her and passes into her body: ‘Her face, pressed sideways to the piling, absorbs it all.’ In the first story in Specimen Days, ‘In the Machine’, set at the height of New York’s industrial revolution, a young boy called Lucas ...”

“... of his most famous photographs: the cyclist caught gliding down a cobbled hill at the base of some stone steps in Hyères, and the man jumping over a puddle behind the Gare Saint-Lazare, captured in mid-air and reflected perfectly in the water, the pitched roof of the station behind him shrouded in mist. Madrid, 1933 Behind the Gare Saint-Lazare, Paris, 1932 ...”

“... popularity with her accession, it could take nothing for granted. It was less than a decade since Robert Peel had predicted that it would not last another five years, and while the violent civil disorder of the early 1830s had abated, there was still considerable ambivalence towards an institution whose incumbents in the two previous reigns had done much to ...”

“... owned a van’. The couple married in 1937 when Beth fell pregnant; the child, a boy called Robert, died. Two years later, they had Cora and after the war, opened a newsagent-tobacconist-cornershop called the Cabinette. Twenty years later, Janice is a toddler and Eddie is increasingly flailing, violent, drunk. Shortly before Beth and Janice leave for ...”

“... there is a colour, a quiet but tireless goodness that things at rest, like a brick wall or a small stone, seem to affirm. He goes on to set out his ambition ‘to transcribe middleness with all its grits, bumps and anonymities, in its fullness of satisfaction and mystery’. To see what this might mean, let’s take one of James Wood’s examples, a sentence ...”

“... books, including (chosen because I read them too): The Wind in the Willows, The Sword in the Stone, Through the Looking-Glass, Burglar Bill, Alfie Gets in First, Where the Wild Things Are. Piaget’s theories of childhood development are introduced, as are some of the problems with them. We learn that ‘by the time of the Domesday Book in 1086 it would ...”

“... to the stylist as ‘interpreter between the industry and the consumer’. ‘The foundation stone of the previous intellectual structure of Design Theory has crumbled,’ Banham wrote in 1961. ‘There is no longer universal acceptance of Architecture as the universal analogy of design.’ In this scheme of things the book didn’t kill ...”

“... that they’d . . . construct some decent facsimile of life below in the grass, brick and grey stone, perceive the human grain making up the fabric of the view. Otherwise what could the eye see as it looked down on a strange land from so high, except history instead of yesterday, prophecy instead of tomorrow, and a today that was either a view, or a ...”