“... in the grate and a smelly tallow candle to hold back the night. Thomas Rowlandson, ‘Vaux-Hall’ (c.1784). For the price of a ticket, one could enjoy musical performances and refreshments al fresco, or simply see and be seen. Princes rubbed shoulders with prostitutes, duchesses with doctors’ daughters: the social mix was a large part of the ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... Sitwell said, Sargent’s subjects ‘understood at last how rich they really were’. ‘Le chef de rayon de la peinture’ – the department store manager of painting – is how Degas characterised him. John Singer Sargent, ‘The Daughters of Edward Darley Boit’ (1882) It is hard to imagine that anyone looking ...”

“... and fear of change’, but it was a period when conventions hardened in reaction to the fin-de-siècle stirrings of the Aesthetic Movement, The Yellow Book and talk of votes for women. Increasingly one was either in or out of respectable society. Ida was 15 when she enrolled at the Slade School of Fine Art, where her father had studied, arriving just in ...”