“... and lawyers – sought the status that a concierge, electric lights, a lift and a marble-lined hall could bring. In Theodor Fontane’s The Poggenpuhl Family, old Prussian nobility sit in a cramped, damp flat overlooking a cemetery counting out each pfennig. In Hugues’s street, behind the turreted façades, the spacious flats had seven, eight, even ten ...”

“... with its ectoplasmic T-shirts and made straight for the auditorium – or was it Valhalla, the hall of the slain?The auditorium had an emptiness that could speak to us all. One shouldn’t really, in this context, use the phrase ‘warm-up act’, but there he was in a loud shirt, Rob Green from Nottingham. He played a guitar and had enough spontaneous ...”

“... fence into the next-door garden and disappeared. ‘Ladies and gentlemen,’ Mrs Shire said, ‘do you know who that was?’ She paused, more for dramatic effect than in any expectation of an answer. ‘That,’ she said, ‘was F.R. Leavis.’ She lingered on the two initials. No one said anything, but it was obvious that the name was meaningless to most ...”

“... went by, a man in a dirty white drill suit rocked himself backwards and forwards in a chair in the hall, making a small draught in the mosquitoey evening. I was reminded of Villahermosa during the persecution in Tabasco. The smell of a police station lay over the city. I was back in what my critics imagine to be Greeneland. The writer’s objection to the ...”

“... at the Ulster Office during a demonstration; the latter a drug-user and small-time criminal who’d met Purdie in prison). Having read Purdie and Prescott’s address books, the police went after two couples wanted for cheque fraud who were living in a commune in Amhurst Road in Stoke Newington. The house was searched and alleged to contain guns, explosives ...”

“... through the Soviet dom kommuna (communal house) of the 1920s and 1930s to Le Corbusier’s Unité d’habitation or Cité radieuse, a housing block in Marseille designed around lengthy ‘rues intérieures’ on every third floor. Luckhurst’s trenchant survey of social engineering by means of ‘corridic horizontality’ reaches its conclusion in the City ...”

“... This AA generation shared certain similarities with both the Italian ‘tendenza’ – the de Chirico revival school of Aldo Rossi in Italy – and the New York Five, particularly Peter Eisenman and Richard Meier, with whom they shared an interest in theory. Initially, Jones, together with Jeremy Dixon and Michael Gold, worked for the firm of Frederick ...”

“... the Border hills near Beattock on the way to South Uist and Barra. At Oban I’ll rendezvous with David Paterson, a landscape photographer, who’s working with me on a book on the Highland Clearances. As I overtake a worn blue Audi estate, I look sideways and see Dave’s face and grizzled beard. We exchange incoherent signs, pull in a little later on the ...”

“... discerning portrait of a movie star we will ever have. But Cary Grant deserves this as much as we do. His subject is Pretending. There are those among us who felt our lives were shaped by the balanced but enigmatic Grant, even as we knew (without understanding properly) that this tanned Mr Lucky, a Beverly Hills rake, had once been Archie Leach, a pale kid ...”

“... Stravinsky and Bartók’s orchestral music had already given percussion players more to do than simply emphasise harmonic climaxes with clashes of the cymbals, in the fashion of the Romantic symphony. But Cage followed Varèse, whose pioneering percussion ensemble work Ionisation he praised in a letter from 1940 to Peter Yates – the same Yates ...”

“... unionists and Italian Marxists were forever dropping in on his house in Spitalfields, which Stuart Hall recalled as a ‘sort of permanently open unofficial conference centre with some informal seminar always in permanent session in the kitchen’. In 1967, Samuel founded the History Workshop movement to democratise ‘the act of historical ...”

“... Wilson (President of the Kipling Society) pointed out in his 1977 biography, this won’t really do. You can’t ignore half a career, or the political and literary traditions which shaped the whole of it. Unlike Wells, say, Kipling is not a latecomer to the party who can be relieved of blunt implements at the door and coaxed apologetically towards the ...”

“... a plum, and throw the rest away. Plum-picking explains why Dickens’s dealings with Chapman and Hall and Bradbury and Evans have survived, while the bulk of their papers have disappeared (some B&E materials washed up in the Punch archive; those of C&H were, apparently, thrown out when the firm was taken over by Methuen in 1938). Only after 1945 did large ...”

“... performance of ‘Like a Rolling Stone’ immortalised on what became known as the Royal Albert Hall bootleg, though it seems that most of this tape was recorded at the Free Trade Hall in Manchester. Dylan and the Band had been barracked between most of the numbers of the second half of the show, in which he changed from ...”

“... of the editor, even ‘boredom and emptiness were to be experienced to the full.’ By comparison, David Josephson’s more modest essay on Percy Grainger in Music and Civilisation comes as a refreshing surprise. Josephson is a victim of Lang’s musicological high-mindedness only to the extent that he distrusts any kind of ad hominem argument that could ...”