“... theatre in which tier on tier of streets look out across the estuary to the mountains. Not only James Watt, but many painters, novelists and poets began here. After utter collapse, small citizens’ groups are trying to rub the old town back to life, to restore hope: a new theatre, the restoration of the huge ropeworks factory, a protest (why use cobbles ...”

“... rework – had the dubious merit of having once painted stormy waves over a calm harbour scene by Turner. Ned did well enough at school to be allowed to study classics, and his classmates became his first real friends. He was attracted to religious ceremony, and arrived at Oxford in 1853 a fervent Tractarian: he dreamed of following in the footsteps of John ...”

“... was brought up by his paternal grandparents, while Crippen ‘turned his sights east’. Cora Turner, born Kunegunde Mackamotzki, and later to restyle herself as Belle Elmore, was the daughter of a hard-up German immigrant family in Brooklyn. She had an (illegal) abortion, aged eighteen, after her domestic employer got her pregnant. Dr George Clinton ...”

“... Reed. The Beats were now heritage fodder, a potential Bloomsbury group. There was even talk of James Ivory optioning a Neal Cassady property. I wondered, thinking of Blake’s formative experiences there, whether Carolyn had caught any of Alan Bennett’s Westminster Abbey footage? Bennett, required to audition for the John Betjeman slot, couldn’t bring ...”

“... meant something. In Wojas’s day, the idea of a radical act was to enter the whole club for the Turner Prize.There were certain especially instructive figures, among them Julian Maclaren-Ross, denizen of Fitzrovia, not least because his travails forever appeared to eclipse his talent. Although he was a very good writer indeed, the question of how he looked ...”

“... for Bush, Nader became a scapegoat for Democrats. ‘I will not speak his name,’ the strategist James Carville said. Nader himself remained unmoved; he ran again in 2004 and 2008. Along with these quixotic campaigns, he continued to sponsor citizen groups with agendas ranging from protecting Americans with disabilities to filing tort claims against ...”

“... of thanking the Islamic Republic ‘for all the things it had taught me – to love Austen and James and ice cream and freedom’. She started a list under the title ‘Things I’ve Been Silent About’ when she began work on her first academic book, a study of Nabokov, and realised that she ‘could not frankly write about the political and social ...”

“... Tailor – ‘a device so simple that it left him genuinely elated by its symmetry’. Clive James, writing in 1977, had similar feelings about the ‘symmetrical economy’ of The Spy who Came in from the Cold (1963). ‘It could,’ he said, ‘be turned into an opera.’ Le Carré – that is, David Cornwell, an ex-spy – once said that he entered ...”

“... With American forces in Baghdad, Perle continued his rhetorical assault on Syria. He told Graham Turner, whose three-part article, ‘An American Odyssey’, appeared in the Daily Telegraph in June: ‘Somehow, we’ve got to isolate Assad and make him realise that there’s very little benefit in playing host to these people’ – i.e. Hizbollah and ...”

“... Tite Street was the family home; he did not return there. The spectre of Wilde haunted Henry James in the first two months of 1895, and James’s correspondence gives us a much richer sense than Wilde’s does of what the opening of a new play could mean at the turn of the 19th century. ‘Who shall deny the immense ...”

“... West End, with its salubrious air and proximity to the Houses of Parliament and the Court of St James’s, was more attractive than ever. Its rise was unstoppable, its nature always mutable. There was no crisis from which it did not emerge invigorated. John Nash designed Piccadilly Circus as a rond-point for his great picturesque town plan leading up Regent ...”

“... Parliament and involved riots and pamphlet wars; eventually, it led to such songs and poems as James Thomson’s ‘Rule, Britannia’ and Robert Burns’s ‘A Parcel of Rogues’. A digital search shows that the words ‘Scots’ and ‘Scotland’ occur nowhere in the London-published 1707 Affairs of State. This tells us something more important about ...”

“... brackish and personal way, elements of the classical tradition (their Economist Building in St James’s was a well-crafted, contextual work for an establishment client), it was all over for Banham – it was a betrayal, after which he went to look elsewhere for his architecture autre. The nearest​ that any of the Brutalist revival volumes published in ...”

“... he wasn’t romantically interested in her – seducing a string of famous pin-ups including Lana Turner, Norma Shearer and Ava Gardner, who became his first wife. ‘Who wouldn’t want to go out with me?’ Rooney asked. ‘I had my own car, I had some nickels in my pocket and I was somebody.’Being ‘somebody’ didn’t come with the same benefits for ...”

“... to give them extra zest’, while the Man Group is an investment management business, though the James Man who founded the original company was an 18th-century barrel-maker (his firm supplied the navy with rum for almost two hundred years). Touches such as Elysian’s ‘Giraffe carrot’, so large that a single specimen can fill a vegetable dish for Sunday ...”