“... magic building called the Khan Mirjan. This is a 14th-century caravanserai or staging inn, a great hall with a gallery under improbably high pointed arches. We were served by a dancing waiter, designed by Toulouse-Lautrec: a bottle was balanced on his bald head, a tray was spinning on his thumb. The second-century arch at Ctesiphon is in the same high ...”

“... of the working classes in the second half of the 20th century: ‘the telly, the car, the bingo hall … eating fish and chips in Spain’. The laughter of the Cheltenham audience is tinged with shock that he should be quite so sneering. In the second lecture, discussing the unfortunate consequences of Eliot’s ‘Francophilia’ and referring to his essay ...”

“... to find a purer expression of the life transformed through education than his. At Albrighton Hall, his college of further education, Blunkett wanted to take O-levels, but the headmaster was ‘a caricature of the progressive educationist, believing that exams were not merely unnecessary but positively harmful, narrowing intellectual development’. He ...”

“... established this stretch of riverside as a public space, and brought in its aftermath the Festival Hall, the National Film Theatre and, on the other side of Giles Gilbert Scott’s Waterloo Bridge, the new National Theatre. The next came in 1977, with the foundation of the Coin Street Action Group when, reacting against a decline in public housing and the ...”

“... Elsewhere he notes the exclusion of the vernacular, the dialects of business, trade, music-hall, barrack-room, bar-room and those professional discourses not represented in the old universities. The OED has generally disregarded the lower classes and their rich argots, and relegated women and minorities as providers of source ...”

“... Lindsay Anderson lives in a flat in one of the redbrick turn-of-the-century blocks behind John Barnes in Swiss Cottage. With its solid turreted houses, backing on gardens, Can-field, Compayne, Aberdare, Broadhurst, it’s the haunt of refugees, and Jewish old ladies, and perhaps (Lindsay would strike out that ‘perhaps’) the most European bit of ...”

“... by the shabby grandeur, the misplaced Portland stone pomposity of the defunct Shoreditch Town Hall; a Renaissance palazzo, strident with towers, Ionic columns, allegorical figures and upbeat sloganeering: ‘More Light, More Power’. The scale of this structure, its link with Shoreditch Church broken by the railway bridge, distracts the restless knot of ...”

“... the women’s movement, and took part in the protest against the Miss World contest at the Albert Hall in 1970.The inquiry has shown that the SDS focused on ‘extreme left-wing’ groups, Trotskyists in particular: ‘the International Socialists, who became the SWP in 1977; the International Marxist Group; and the Workers Revolutionary Party. Maoist groups ...”

“... established a new unit, which quickly became known as the ‘anti-mugging squad’.In 1978, Stuart Hall wrote in Policing the Crisis: Mugging, the State and Law and Order of the emergence of a new word – ‘mugging’ – which was used to describe a supposedly ‘new strain of crime’:In the ‘mugging’ period the police gained deliberate publicity in ...”

“... who played the organ for the first performance of Mendelssohn’s Elijah in Birmingham Town Hall in 1847, Mendelssohn himself wrote that ‘but for him I should have had no organ to play on. He ought to have a statue.’ It was left to a few critics like George Bernard Shaw to question not only the popularity of oratorio but its ability to present the ...”

“... to believe that you are men in female attire.’ Stella was indeed one Ernest Boulton, music hall artiste and rent boy, and Fanny was Frederick Park, a trainee solicitor. At Bow Street police station they were arrested and charged with sodomy. Stella, it transpired, had been living as the wife of Lord Arthur Pelham-Clinton MP, who promptly died of ...”

“... Powell is 92 this year. He has written 19 novels, four volumes of memoirs, one sort of biography (John Aubrey and His Friends), three plays, two books of collected literary criticism, and now, with the arrival of Journals 1990-92, three volumes of diaries. The D&O is there from the first words of his first novel, Afternoon Men, published 65 years ...”

“... proposition in due course – in forty years, perhaps. JET is already as big as a concert hall, and still the horizon of exploitation is about forty years ahead. Another type of hot fusion device would focus laser pulses from all directions on a tiny pellet of the nuclear fuel, compressing, heating, and ‘igniting’ it before it has time to fly ...”

“... What is one to make of an organisation whose leaders have names like Dummy Oliver, Blinker Hall, Biffy Dunderdale, Lousy Payne, Buster Milmo, Pay Sykes, Tar Robertson, Barmy Russel and Quex Sinclair (not to be confused with his successor but one, Sinbad Sinclair)? It’s no good reassuring the reader that in the transition from Victorian days, when men ...”

“... newspapers.* Last summer? Well, that problem was solved last week when the Gospel according to St John, all 1300 pages of it, beat the dust out of the doormat. It is a sure sign that spring is in the air when Wisden arrives. While there is a good twelve months browse therein, one flick through is enough to stir the brain cells. It is the cricketer’s holy ...”