“... shadowed by Charlie Chaplin, who seems to have been on everyone’s guest list. Lawrence knew John and Susan Buchan, country-house owners of the new weekending sort, and spent his time with them talking about ‘the Arabs … his muddled masochism and his … disillusion’; Baldwin appears at Warwick Castle and at Madresfield, which was in part the model ...”

“... the museum after its redesign by the Japanese architect Yoshio Taniguchi. In the New Yorker John Updike likened its presence to ‘an invisible cathedral’, but it is closer to an abstract palace. The main access is now nearer Sixth than Fifth Avenue, and you enter from either 53rd or 54th Street into a lobby, paced with white columns, that cuts all ...”

“... to work in his Jag as Robyn Penrose tootles to college in her Renault 5, or Philip Swallow and Morris Zapp of Changing Places crossing somewhere above the North Pole as their planes take them in opposite directions for the start of their academic job-swap. Two ideas setting off for each other’s point of origin: Paradise News lacks this beautifully simple ...”

“... by Flemish painting. Later he studied at Ghent and in the Antwerp Academy. Unlike William Morris, Dante Gabriel Rossetti, or Edward Burne-Jones, Brown profited from a broad and thorough education in the business of painting. Later, his art became a passion and a vocation. But it never ceased to be a job from which a living had somehow to be ...”

“... numbers of copies of itself. It subsequently turned out that the worm had been written by Robert Morris Jr, son of the chief scientist at the National Computer Security Centre, in what he described as an innocent experiment that went wrong. It had exploited a bug in Berkeley Unix – specifically, in Sendmail, a program designed to transmit email across any ...”

“... the prose of the catalogue and the TV commentaries, where they are rather heavily underlined by John Tavener’s music for the title sequences. Still, the organisers encourage us to compromise, to substitute human for theological concepts, to accept the life and sufferings of Christ as ‘archetypes of all human experience’, conveying truths not just to ...”

“... material possibilities of architecture. The difference was that while Krier had acquired a William Morris-like horror of the modern world, Koolhaas inoculated himself to it by embracing the nightmarish vision of what he characterised as ‘Junkspace’, the soft underbelly of shopping malls, giant sheds and airport terminals. Both Koolhaas and Krier have ...”

“... frequently recalls other masters of strange, urgent sentences: Monty Python; Samuel Beckett; Chris Morris in Blue Jam; and perhaps most vividly of all, Vivian Stanshall in Sir Henry at Rawlinson End. In fact, A Humument is a novel of quotation: not only in the sense that all of its words were written first by Mallock (although not, as Eric Morecambe said of ...”

“... even though he ‘read every pertinent document in every available archive’.But then, in 2011, John Tofik Karam, a young scholar working on the Arab diaspora in Brazil, published a piece in Latin American and Caribbean Ethnic Studies. Karam had come across the Paraguay programme while researching Arab migrations to South America. He was relieved to hear ...”

“... self-identity, unified only by the death which annuls it: When I was a kid a man called Morris slapped my face so crazily hard it opened a room inside my head where plates of light skittered and slid and wouldn’t quite fit, as they were meant to, together. It felt like the way, when you stand between mirrors, the slab of your face shoots ...”

“... confront us from the back wall while in the middle of the floor, humped in silence, is Robert Morris’s big low cage of a steel sculpture of 1967 and to either side whitish paintings by Robert Ryman and Agnes Martin. No self-respecting museum would present a combination which was so insouciant art-historically, but it does look very good. The second room ...”

“... We think now of Margaret Thatcher and Ken Livingstone, but the pattern can be traced back to King John, when London sneaked its own municipal charter under the lee of the barons, and even before. From almost the start, the dominance of Roman London in the affairs of Britain was a surprise, and shakily defined. But the climax came in the 17th century, in ...”

“... I recognised two of his aides as my UCLA classmates: ramrod-stiff, crew-cut Bob Haldeman and jowly John Ehrlichman, Nixon’s ‘gatekeeper’ and dirty-tricks adviser respectively. Bob, wintry-eyed and controlled, whispered urgently to a Secret Service guy. But it was Ehrlichman’s gaze that held me. Hot, angry, personal. From a sidewalk angle looking ...”

“... and started a great flood of work by others which has not ceased with his death. Along with John Rawls, he initiated the vastly influential tradition within analytic philosophy of substantive moral exploration of major public issues, bringing high standards of clarity, rational argument and lucid expression to questions that matter to many more people ...”

“... if we were some sort of archaeological dig’. All ambitious politicians primp in some fashion. John Edwards, one of Hillary’s rivals for the Democratic nomination, was recently in trouble for allegedly paying between $400 and $1000 for a haircut. As a woman, however, she faces more sustained and malicious pressure in regard to her appearance, a subject ...”