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“... even King Midas might have envied. It is to the unravelling of this extraordinary development that Phillip Hall has devoted the last ten years of his life, and as a result, he has produced a fascinating, indeed sensational book. Between the Glorious Revolution of 1688 and the death of Queen Victoria in 1901, Hall shows ...”

“... returned to London where he offered the director of Naval Intelligence, the famous ‘Blinker’ Hall, what he had been able to pick up from his dealings with the Germans. But Hall was too wily a bird to be snared by the likes of Lincoln and had his background investigated. There followed an embarrassing interview in which ...”

“... one catastrophe and the next. But the Seventies had no separate identity. Recognising this, Phillip Whitehead begins his book – written to accompany the Channel 4 series of the same name – with the euphoria of Harold Wilson’s victory in 1964. He ends in 1981 with the ‘drying-out of the wets’ by Mrs Thatcher in her autumn reshuffle. The ...”

“... McCormick is as shrill and manichean as those he fought. He writes like Sapper on an off day: The hall was packed full. And what a horrible sight! There were some terrible faces contorted with rage and hatred for everybody (I suppose they were ‘alienated’). These were the class warriors. It was a dingy decaying building and it was now peopled with these ...”

“... Gorbachev and one with Philby, every one of us would have picked the latter. In the event, it was Phillip Knightley who landed the fish, but only after twenty years of patient casting. When news came on the World Service on Sunday morning last March that the Sunday Times had started a serialisation of his week of interviews with the old spy, my reaction was ...”

“... from a distance like lichen and, on closer inspection, like blight. Monk and Coltrane at Carnegie Hall, Nat King Cole (the After Midnight Sessions with Sweets Edison, Stuff Smith and Juan Tizol), Ralph Stanley and his Clinch Mountain Boys, Ray Charles. And towards the end of the day, with the setting sun doing something wonderful with the sandstone in the ...”

“... raised in a desert, where clay-built man subsists on clay’.Back at Sydney Cove, Governor Arthur Phillip was delighted to receive his copies of Wedgwood’s medallion, which ‘showed the world that our Welsh clay is capable of receiving an Eligant impression’. Just as the clay pressed into Wedgwood’s mould had taken on the shape of a classical ...”

“... his famous AT&T building in New York. Here it is the pinnacled, stepped gable of a Flemish cloth-hall raised in overtopping triplicate eight or nine hundred feet high. It must be said that it’s a popular building with Houstonians, and in a sense a trademark one among the relative anonymity of its neighbours. If the Transco Tower is more successful it is ...”

“... who rather likes living here, I am the beneficiary of an invasion. If honour is due to Captain Phillip, a brave leader with amazing management skills, more is due to the convicts, who fetched, carried and built on the fatal shore, often in conditions of enslavement – although, in his chapter ‘The Invasion’ in Australians to 1788, Geoffrey Blainey ...”

“... to wake up with them all transferred to me. When I’d finished in the bathroom I stood in the hall. The whole house seemed to be silent, though from the attic came the distant sound of ‘A Saucerful of Secrets’. Someone in the house was burning incense. I crept down the stairs to the ground floor. The living-room door was open. I peered round it into ...”

“... the documentary Regarding Susan Sontag (2014) and in the feminist fight club classic Town Bloody Hall (1979), where, from the audience, she takes Norman Mailer to task for his patronising use of the term ‘lady’ as a prefix – lady writer, lady critic. Even when issuing a rebuke (‘It feels like gallantry to you, but it doesn’t feel right to ...”