“... is also ‘a state of controlled panic’). Privation fuels the eye’s predations, and when Joseph Summers described Marianne Moore’s meticulous attention as a ‘method of escaping intolerable pain’, Bishop wrote to him to say that she was just beginning to realise this about herself. Yet while the cultivation of impressions might be an enabling ...”

“... divisions were heightened by growing militancy in the trade union movement, particularly when Frank Cousins became leader of the Transport and General Workers’ Union in 1956. At the TUC Congress that year Cousins rejected government calls for wage restraint and told delegates: ‘In a period of freedom for all, we are part of the all.’ Whereas ...”

“... skulduggery, scams and religions, ditto. Dirt-poor, barefoot, backwoods Florida (the subject of Frank Conroy’s memoir of the 1930s and 1940s, Stop-Time) is not all that long gone. Sweet tea, squirrel and grits Florida. Then, successively, railroads, oranges, real estate, wintering place, destination for domestic and foreign tourism, and retirement ...”

“... should look in their bound form. But with what descriptive flair he applies his veto: ‘Dear Frank, I just got the photostat of the new jacket design for ADA, and I do not like it at all. The lettering is dumpy, with apertures en cul-de-poule. The coloration of the word ADA recalls at first blush the nacrine inner layer of a dejected shellfish, and, at a ...”

“... That was not all. The confessions were backed by the most overwhelming scientific evidence. Dr Frank Skuse, a Home Office forensic scientist, had found traces of nitroglycerine on the young woman’s hands as soon as she’d been arrested. He’d also found nitroglycerine, he said, on her duffle bag, which had been rescued from one of the freight wagons ...”

“... for the office, clearly knowing when he was licked. You couldn’t hope to out-dress old Frankie-Frank Spellman, one of the great bitch drag queens of this or any other age. Nobody should grudge the frumpish Hoover a fling or two, or indeed a flounce, though probably with his figure and complexion the stockings were a mistake. (Didn’t he have one kind ...”

“... Nazis to ‘co-ordinate’ the media when they came to power in 1933. Reich propaganda minister Joseph Goebbels had long condemned what he called ‘the lying Jewish press’, and within a few weeks, the Nazis had closed down the Social Democratic Party’s outlets (it printed more than two hundred newspapers in 1929, with an overall circulation of 1.3 ...”

“... to give it? We live in a culture where belief in the supernatural is strong and growing. In 1660 Joseph Glanvil (quoted by Taylor) could write: ‘The present-day world treats all such stories with laughter and derision and is firmly convinced that they should be scorned as a waste of time and old wives’ tales ...’ But in 1977 a poll of American ...”

“... silence, a few people made remarks like: “Well, it worked.”’ Indeed, Oppenheimer’s brother Frank thought that’s what Robert actually said as soon as the atomic thunder permitted intelligible speech: ‘It worked.’ That sounds about right: the scientists and engineers had spent over two years trying to make an atomic bomb that worked and the test ...”

“... on overkill, as if Foster wanted to outdo the tomes produced for more notorious peers such as Frank Gehry and Rem Koolhaas, whose offices seem like cottage industries in comparison with his. For Foster is also ‘Foster and Partners’, a practice of more than six hundred people with projects in fifty countries. There are six large design groups, each ...”

“... a pariah. The mores of late Georgian England, sceptical and sometimes callous, seem refreshingly frank. ‘I always liked very old people when they were clean and appeared respectable’ is something Wilson can say without blinking. Not only was there less hypocrisy about sex and marriage than there would be twenty years later, there was no sentimentality ...”

“... Gaudi in Barcelona, Wagner and Hoffman in Vienna, Guimard and Horta in France and Belgium, Frank Lloyd Wright in the US – of which he finds Clough, and the AA generally, unaware. I am not at all sure, either about the unawareness or about this ferment being the only one available. After all, Clough was plumb in the middle of the excitements of the ...”

“... crucial figure of this period was not Woodcock, a more than usually isolated TUC Secretary, but Frank Cousins, who swung the Transport Union sharply to the left and defined his creed by saying that, in a capitalist free-for-all, unions were part of the ‘all’. This is reminiscent of the reply given by the first leader of the American Federation of ...”

“... under other names – whether as Flann O’Brien (‘As a lad I knew Ibsen … Swinburne and Joseph Conrad were also frequent visitors to my grandfather’s place … At dusk, Coleridge would sometimes look in on his way home for a final pipe, and more than once the burly shape of Lord Macaulay was known to grace the gathering’) or Myles na gCopaleen ...”

“... Shall​  we never again talk together in laconic?’ Joseph Addison once wrote to Jonathan Swift, by way of inviting him to dinner the next time he happened to be in London. It’s the kind of invitation that might well appeal to Helen DeWitt, an ardent admirer of 18th-century wits and philosophers, and a classicist whose erudition undoubtedly extends to a familiarity with the defining features of Spartan rhetoric (Laconia is the region of the south-eastern Peloponnese which includes the city of Sparta ...”