“... gallery” space for pop-up shops, the project is one of several nearby which anticipate major transformation in the area.’ There there will also be a new pedestrianised ‘walking’ area between Soho Square and Charing Cross Road, with plans to enhance the east end of Oxford Street as a ‘retail destination’. It’s predicted that an extra ...”

“... He runs away, sells his body on the road and catches a venereal disease. He’s picked up by a john who claims to be a physician called Dr Traylor, and promises to cure him with antibiotics. He makes good on that pledge, but also locks Jude in his basement for three months as his sex slave, for sessions with a poker. Offering release, the doctor tells Jude ...”

“... John Maltby​ , the studio potter and sculptor, used to say that you can’t make a teapot about your father’s death. Grayson Perry’s whole career assumes the opposite, that you can express any amount of personal and social comment through traditional forms of craft, not just pottery but tapestry and textile design: the Tate sells a printed silk headscarf of his that wouldn’t look out of place in a county town on market day, but represents contemporary art as a sort of board game, with arrival at the Bankside holy of holies (above the cheeky caption ‘Tat Moderne’) the winner’s reward ...”

“... hundred-page documents entirely blacked out. The government makes regular threats to curb FOI but major legislative rollback has, so far, been kept at bay. The system remains free to access and easy to use: requests can be made by email, letter, phone or social media. Most attempts to rein in the scope of the original act have foundered: in 2007, the Tory MP ...”

“... of the same sculpture (it was ‘the noblest presentment of the human countenance’, according to John Buchan), Beard allows herself a smile in reserve. Under re-examination by 20th-century curators, the bust lost its honoured plinth in the museum. Once hailed as a study done from life, it is now stored away as an 18th-century pastiche. Beard relates many ...”

“... carried on, with his awful quasi-American evangelical rallies, as though people couldn’t think. John Hewson, whose like I trust we shall never see again in this arena, was brought up a Baptist – he’s still got that pious look – and studied postgraduate economics in the USA. Later he left the wife who’d typed his thesis and raised the kids, telling ...”

“... German rail communications. After nine months in the mountains, while still only a 28-year-old major, he was sent to Belgrade as Head of the American Mission to Tito. He ended the war as political adviser to General John Harding (of whose XIII Corps in Venezia Giulia pars minor fui), trying to stop young idiots like ...”

“... of Global 2000. They maintain that the problems are regional and national rather than world-wide. John Wise considers that fish resources are at least keeping pace with world population increase and that, in spite of pollution, aquaculture and fish farming in general do not seem to be suffering in any major way. It is ...”

“... at once so near and so far from the prosperous centre of pre-war English society. One of the major planks of Sailer’s Bermondsey socialism was pacifism and it was his doomed opposition to the war which led to the collapse of his socialist dream and to the installation after the war of the altogether different Labour regime personified by Bob ...”

“... to doubts or to be put off by setbacks, Ron Smith showed as many sterling qualities as Burton, St John Philby or Thesiger. The extent to which the story is true, however, is another question. There are aspects of Foot’s narrative, from suspiciously un-Arab names (Major Absalom) and geographical howlers (‘Red Sea oil ...”

“... of us don’t know what to look for, however, and the aerial view is alien to our sense of scale. John Wise, the pioneering American aeronaut, thought he was looking at a waterfall in a pleasure-garden when he saw Niagara Falls from space. ‘I was disappointed, for my mind had been bent on a soliloquy on Niagara’s raging grandeur … The little frothy ...”

“... space-occupying objects out of purely and essentially sensory and experiential concepts: it is a major lesson of 20th-century attempts actually to effect such a reduction that it is doomed. Our system of concepts of primary properties is more like a primitive theory of the world. If the sources of the conceptual resources of that system are constrained by an ...”

“... But is it any more startling than to find Aneurin Bevan willing (as I have just learned from John Campbell’s Nye Bevan and the Mirage of British Socialism) to see force used in 1948 against dockers seeking to defy Cripps’s wage freeze? Even the most right-wing employer cannot risk industrial relations being made unworkable. Even the most left-wing ...”

“... United States, the envy of his coevals of whatever colour, gender or -ism. Gates is the author of major works of cultural-literary-linguistic exegesis, The Signifying Monkey and Figures in Black, as well as miscellaneous essays and reviews, some of them collected in the recent Loose Canons: Notes on the Culture Wars, a handbook of multiculturalism written ...”

“... invariably demeaned by its occupant. Sixty years ago this month, the then Tory Home Secretary, Sir John Simon, chose to announce a new Public Order Bill in the course of an offensive and thoroughly partisan speech at Cleckheaton Town Hall which just happened to be delivered in the same week in which Labour’s annual conference was taking place. The effect of ...”