“... make women free. Not all women, of course – someone would have to staff the communal eating-hall, a matter which did not worry Gilman, whose élitism, racism and commitment to eugenics give Allen pause. Gilman wanted a world which would be right for people like herself. Allen’s book shows she had reason to believe the one she had been born into did ...”

“... J. P. Taylor liked to point out, Lloyd George’s platform oratory owed a heavy debt to the music hall. He could control an audience with the inspired timing of a stand-up comic. His one-liner about the House of Lords – ‘five hundred men, chosen accidentally from among the unemployed’ – was fit to bring the house down. He was the politician as ...”

“... is angrier about his father’s remoteness. ‘With my parents, it wasn’t just the pram in the hall which was the enemy of promise. My parents didn’t want the pram anywhere in the house.’ Certainly, Thomas seems to have found fatherhood difficult: ‘How can no one be a father to someone?’ he had wondered in Neb, a sentence that might have been ...”

“... became a schoolmaster in Kent, and his son became a headmaster in Essex, and his son, my father, Peter Bunting, fought with distinction, while only a very young man, in the Second World War, and after it was over went up to Brasenose College, Oxford – the first time a Bunting had been so elevated, and unfortunately the last, since I was a student only at ...”

“... referred to in the text as ‘Josef K’ lest we miss the allusion) is a former Music Hall performer, a mind-reader whose powers fade out at London’s perimeter. He lives in four different lodgings at the four corners of the city and dulls his clairvoyance with copious beer and talk. But the roar on the other side of the city’s silence is ...”

“... spilled over naturally into writing it: Garfitt went to informal workshops with John Wain and Peter Levi, heard Ted Hughes read at the Poetry Society. Coghill read his poems, but wasn’t very enthusiastic; Peter Jay took a photo of him in a green silk smoking jacket looking ‘just like Rupert Brooke!’; he talked ...”

“... at the gallery and the Victorian Society, dressed in forensic suits, taped off Walthamstow Town Hall and declared it a Heritage Crime Scene. As the dispute went on two things became clear: significant numbers of local people did not think that the best way to help one of London’s most deprived boroughs was to deprive it of its only world-class cultural ...”

“... which ‘conjures up the now familiar and haunting spectre of urban alienation’. Alison and Peter Smithson’s Robin Hood Gardens in Poplar is a ‘particularly depressing place to live in’, with an ‘almost manic system of walls and moats’, mainly an ‘example of the late modernist avant-garde determination to realise a theoretical position at ...”

“... the reality of a Slav majority in Austria. In the 1890s militant anti-semitism conquered the Town Hall of Vienna. Liberalism was increasingly, if never exclusively, a Jewish affair. Deserted by German-Austrians, Jews increasingly became dynastic patriots. Too late they discovered that in the competing arrogances of ethnic antagonism they had played a ...”

“... George of Dwyfor, and then led us off down miles of corridors to a cellar under St Stephen’s Hall where we were finally allowed a drink. The House of Lords is not, to be sure, the only British institution which reduces unsuspecting observers to a state of giggling incredulity. But for unblushing anachronism, it defeats even the Church of England, the ...”

“... Peter Redgrove had a secret. It was called ‘the Game’. Sexual in nature, this obsessive ritual ignited some of his most arresting poetry, and was vital to his personal mythology for sixty years. Known only to his lovers and a few in his inner circle, the Game has now been made public in Neil Roberts’s remarkable biography of the poet, published almost a decade after Redgrove’s death, along with a new Collected Poems ...”

“... walls still look impressive, even from the bench), but, dissatisfied even with the enormous hall and galleries added by John of Gaunt in the 14th century, he then built what was in effect a whole new Tudor palace within the medieval walls. This entire section of the castle, together with a state-of-the-art garden installed at a speed which would do ...”

“... with him. The story goes that Schoenberg dismissed him, telling him he lacked an ear for harmony. Peter Yates’s book Twentieth-Century Music: Its Evolution from the End of the Harmonic Era into the Present Era of Sound (1968), reported Schoenberg as saying that Cage was ‘not a composer – but an inventor of genius’, a back-handed compliment that stuck ...”

“... last Christmas season before the war he was given the part of Slightly, one of the Lost Boys in Peter Pan. Forty years later, Kenneth Tynan wrote of him that ‘in 1913 he was Slightly in Peter Pan, and you might say that he has been wholly in Peter Pan ever since.’ It was not exactly ...”

“... of Canterbury gingerly touching the bone threaded through the nose of some Zulu warrior. Peter Hall’s Sanderson advert. The flat is airy and comfortable. A corridor lined with photographs, but not, as in my house, picked up at junk shops. His own school. His own life. Pre-war gym displays at Cheltenham College. Lindsay as a child in India ...”