“... quartier as the basis of urban planning in Europe; on the other side were Robert Venturi, Denise Scott Brown and Steven Izenour, who embraced the commercial strip (‘billboards are almost all right,’ they proclaimed in 1972 in Learning from Las Vegas, a manifesto to which Delirious New York is an indirect riposte). Koolhaas could reject the reactionary ...”

“... is surprising. Balmoral has always been a byword for biscuit-tin tartanry. The novelist George Scott-Moncrieff, hardly a radical, described ‘the deadening slime of Balmorality’ as ‘a glutinous compound of hypocrisy, false sentiment, industrialism, ugliness and clammy pseudo-Calvinism’. I admire these descriptors, but I’m not sure that the ...”

“... also requested by Gary Glitter (currently serving sixteen years as a convicted paedophile); Ronnie Scott (who asked for a Faye Dunaway doll, though Plomley persuaded him to take a saxophone instead); and the actor and explorer Duncan Carse, who asked for a ‘rubber woman’. Strangely, the BBC website says he asked for a ‘pin-up picture’. Glitter’s ...”

“... In a speech given early last month, Michael Howard shared his thoughts on education with the Welsh Conservative Party Conference in Cardiff. He was mainly concerned with the problem of discipline. ‘Guess which class children are most likely to misbehave in?’ The answer turned out to be Citizenship. And which subject would best teach children ‘respect for authority and the importance of discipline in school’? History ...”

“... at that, now,’ her mother, a perfume magnate whose Protestant husband died nastily for Michael Collins, says of a cup of tea: ‘Strong enough to trot a mouse on.’ He amuses himself, also, by playing up the hero’s drink problem – Marlowe has to be helped into a taxi, passes out in his clothes, throws up – and having him grouse about his ...”

“... prescriptive social right to idleness’. Before 1640, only a dangerous radical like Thomas Scott dared to insist that the upper classes should work. Winstanley (and perhaps More in the decent obscurity of Latin) proposed to abolish the gentry altogether. Burton, who hinted at the problem, was more concerned to see that younger brothers like himself ...”

“... women but Hunt implicitly takes a stand against those authors (especially Carole Pateman and Joan Scott) who see a symbiotic relationship between the rise of equal rights for men and female subjugation, arguing that modern forms of individuation depend on radical sexual differentiation. What matters, Hunt argues, is not that the American revolutionaries did ...”

“... made me a suit last year. My first suit and probably my last. 3 March. Lunch at L’Etoile with Michael Palin and Barry Cryer, Elena Salvoni still presiding there at lunchtime and though she’s 90 not looking much different from when I first got to know her at Bianchi’s in the 1960s. Barry as usual fires off the jokes which are almost his trademark but ...”

“... successor agency, the CIA, away from the humdrum routine of intelligence-gathering towards action.Scott Anderson recounts the careers of four OSS agents whose underground war against the Axis turned into a crusade to ‘roll back’ communism in Eastern Europe and Asia. One was Frank Wisner, a corporate lawyer who enlisted to work in naval intelligence early ...”

“... of the most prominent figures missing from Finkelstein and McCleery’s Reader, David Scott Kastan, has riffed on ‘New Criticism’, ‘New Historicism’ and ‘New Bibliography’ to dub his expertise the ‘New Boredom’.) The New Critics took ‘the poem itself’ where they found it, in cheap paperback reprints available even at ...”

“... Both of them were careful to spare the susceptibilities of their correspondents back at home. Michael Hurd (The Ordeal of Ivor Gurney) may well be right in contending that Gurney’s madness cannot simply be traced to his experiences in the trenches, horrible though they were. At the Front he seems to have been stoical, cheerful, relaxed, detached: as if ...”

“... with some authors, when the stimulant had kicked in. Kingsley Amis could gauge the intake of Paul Scott page by page – a stroke of magnificent intuition which is confirmed by the Spurting biography, incidentally; and the same holds with writers like Koestler and Orwell, depending on whether or not they had a proper supply of shag. Kiernan suggests that both ...”

“... accuracy or, as it seemed to Dante Gabriel Rossetti, literalism; he complained to William Bell Scott that most of the Academy pictures that year were ‘done in prose’. But this was what the general art-viewing public of the mid-Victorian years liked, a picture with a story they could follow and explain to one another. Not that it had to be a nice ...”

“... Many Hollywood stars, for example, attend AA, but you won’t find yourself sitting next to Michael Douglas unless you happen to be in the industry and making seven-figure alimony payments. There is no copyright on the 12-step formula and any number of look-alike therapies have borrowed it: Al-Anon, Al-Ateen, Chocanon, MA (Marijuana Anonymous), Weight ...”

“... Why should peers and baronets be prominent in the British elite of 2024? Take Sir (Walter) John Scott, 5th baronet, countryside campaigner and snuff manufacturer (‘chairman of Sir Walter Scott’s Fine Border Snuff, 2012-, chairman of North Pennine Hunt 2008-’). Google suggests that Sir John is a rather small fish ...”