“... entirely on paper.’ One such was for a terrace at Norwood in the 1850s, which is included in Baker and Hyde’s attractive anthology of London’s freaks, follies and fantasies from the 17th century to the present day. Of the many discarded designs and rejected plans, everyone will have their favourite. For grandeur, there is Wren’s abortive ‘Great ...”

“... recalls it in The Fall of Kelvin Walker, subtitled ‘A Fable of the Sixties’). It occurs to John Dyson, Frayn’s downtrodden hero, that ‘failure was the secular equivalent of sin.’ But even his failure now seems like success. He and Bob Bell work out of the same office collating ‘Years Gone By’ or ‘The Country Day by Day’, duelling with ...”

“... No one talking about anything else. The Speaker gave a right bollocking to Kate Hoey and Norman Baker for allegedly colluding with our oppressors in the media. A good five minutes’ worth. I’ve never seen him so worked up. Actually, it was way over the top. Gave the impression he is rattled, which I imagine he is.  Then to a jam-packed meeting of the ...”

“... of the IWW, the Communist Elizabeth Gurley Flynn and Louis Tikas (a union leader gunned down in John D. Rockefeller Jr’s ‘Ludlow Massacre’ of striking copper miners and their families), but also recognises the corporate and state industrial violence and denial of labour freedom that was a distinctive feature of the ‘American ...”

“... the garage. Scholars have long known that the leading women in Gatsby, Daisy Buchanan and Jordan Baker, were based on Fitzgerald’s early girlfriend, Ginevra King, and her classmate at the Westover School in Connecticut, Edith Cummings, a noted golfer. The men in the story are not so easy to pin down, beginning with Nick Carraway, the narrator. Carraway ...”

“... what was one to do when the cards were not representations of those philistine figures, Mr Bun the Baker and his family, but on high educational grounds pictures of edible and inedible fungi, so that one found oneself gravely asking one’s beaming hostess for monstrous phallic objects, erect and apparently stripped for amorous combat? But entertainment was ...”

“... their replacements come from? Not to mention those who are to teach the extra students whom Mr Baker wants to have access to higher education. No doubt the DES is researching that one. Yet even if the number of graduate scholarships for UK students were to be increased, or if more jobs were created or unfrozen, and even if salaries were restored to their ...”

“... The UK as a Federation, published last year; while Conservatives at Westminster, including Kenneth Baker, Malcolm Rifkind and members of the so-called Democracy Taskforce set up by the Tories in opposition and headed by Ken Clarke, have over the past decade proposed various means of ironing out post-devolutionary wrinkles in the British political system. So ...”

“... According to Henry James, reviewing John Cross’s life of George Eliot, the creations which brought her renown were of the incalculable kind, shaped themselves in mystery, in some intellectual back-shop or secret crucible, and were as little as possible implied in the aspect of her life. There is nothing more singular or striking in Mr Cross’s volumes than the absence of any indication, up to the time the Scenes of Clerical Life were published, that Miss Evans was a likely person to have written them; unless it be the absence of any indication, after they were published, that the deeply studious, concentrated, home-keeping Mrs Lewes was a likely person to have produced their successors ...”

“... of baguette between her teeth so you can’t see her smile. Back in the US, Bouvier got engaged to John Husted, a Wall Street stockbroker, but once her mother learned that he earned just $17,000 a year, the engagement was called off. She made gestures towards an entry-level position at the CIA and won the Paris Prize at Vogue – six months working at the ...”

“... in government. In December 2003 the administration trotted out the Bush family consigliere, James Baker, the consummate oilman, as special presidential envoy to restructure Iraq’s $130 billion debt. Baker’s law firm represents Halliburton; Baker Hughes, his oil-services company, was ...”

“... the personal enthusiasm of successive Conservative ministers of education, Keith Joseph, Kenneth Baker and now, it seems (though he is regrettably attached to the idea of famous names and dates), John MacGregor. It owes rather more perhaps to the HMIs, who in a series of reports have drawn attention to the devastating ...”

“... Moorcock in the days when he was dragged along to BNP-type meetings by his editor, W. Howard Baker, ‘just for the beer’; and before he chucked his typewriter out of the office window and resigned, bunking off to a life of three-day novellas, quick money and lightning debts. Dissolve and fast-forward: now it’s an age of smooth men, of judgments ...”

“... culture, they’ve also carved out a general readership for themselves – witness Nicholson Baker on card catalogues – and joined forces with groups slighted by literary theorists: librarians, book dealers, local historians. Even the form of The Book History Reader privileges empirical case studies over theoretical generalisation, omitting the ...”

“... one’s sense of the possibilities. Fifteen years ago we enjoyed the primes of Jon Vickers, Janet Baker, Dietrich Fischer-Dieskau and Joan Sutherland – all of whom came triumphantly into that category; the voices of Cathy Berberian and Peter Pears vitally inspired Berio and Britten to write important new works for them. Today the excellence of Placido ...”