“... athletic cosmology of boars, bees, angels and divine goddesses, the Red Dragon of Britain and the White Dragon of Anglo-Saxon Wessex both bowing before the Norman Red Lion. When there was a plan to erect a 25-foot bronze unicorn fountain in Parliament Square, a project postponed for want of money, the Poet Laureate ...”

“... Tom Wolfe is, in many ways, an outrageous figure – with his white suit and cane, his glib social analyses, and his delusions of grandeur. For three decades he has been saying that his minutely researched books herald ‘a revolution’ in literature, which is bound to ‘sweep the arts in America, making many prestigious artists … appear effete and irrelevant ...”

“... 1890s to 1940. It was written over the course of four years but reads as if it had been done in white heat over six weeks; each written page represents the compression of a thousand pages read. The moral pressure is extraordinary: with just a few happy exceptions, the story of each writer is told as a miniature tragedy, a squandered opportunity, a ...”

“... Norman Tebbit announced the other day that Tony Blair’s government had made both obesity and Aids in this country much worse by doing ‘everything it can to promote buggery’. Aside from anything else, this comment might cause us to reflect (buggerishly) on the England beloved of bigots like Tebbit and to see it as a land not only of warm beer and cricket on the village green, but also, more significantly, of generations of excellent buggers performing on radio, stage and television, warming the cockles of English hearts and occasionally laying down their trousers in pursuit of their genius ...”

“... packages of the organic. The long, grey slatted façade that rises above them is punctuated by a white lattice over the entrance, a schematic town plan composed of 64 variously chopped-up chequers. And then, overhead, the building’s length is crowned by a further grid, a canopy of large panes looking through to the sky. Acrylic film sealed between the ...”

“... culture holds a special niche permanently vacant for those bookish old ranters (Michael Foot, Norman Thomas) who can qualify for that sort of affectionate obituary even while they are still alive, the paradox of the traditionalist rebel does not automatically connote charm or breadth of mind. In the Puritan revolutions of old, and the Islamic ones of ...”

“... constant. Praxiteles would have knelt in homage to his countrywoman the Duchess of Kent.’ Norman Mailer’s Of Women and their Elegance focuses on sex appeal as it was defined in the American fifties, largely by the Hollywood queen of that era: Marilyn Monroe. Mailer’s long-standing fascination with Monroe has already been expressed in a full ...”

“... practice behind him. A graduate of the Architectural Association, he attended Yale in 1961-62 with Norman Foster; the two were in partnership, together with their spouses, until 1967. Hard though it is to imagine today, Team 4 disbanded for lack of work, but not before they had completed a breakthrough structure for Reliance Controls in Swindon, which Kenneth ...”

“... and sent to Korea in 1953, he thought he’d been given a terrific literary opportunity – Norman Mailer had launched his career with The Naked and the Dead a few years earlier – but Barthelme’s unit arrived the day the truce was signed. Given a job in the Public Information Office, he had plenty of time to write, and soon reported that ‘THE ...”

“... to mount a programme of public works unmatched since Roosevelt’s New Deal. This attracted enough white working-class votes in Pennsylvania, Michigan and Wisconsin to win the electoral college (though not the popular vote). Many of these Rust Belt voters had supported Obama in 2012, not necessarily because they agreed with his liberal social policies, but ...”

“... a prescription for public policy, made on the understanding that something could be done. Men in white coats should be given the funds to get back to their laboratories and defeat Aids. And ‘ought’ in the sense that we had a particular duty to a persecuted group. As well as the practical, good-housekeeping kind of ‘ought’ there was an ...”

“... but he pulled no more steadily than Anthony Burgess. His wife Lynne knocked back two bottles of white wine and a pint of gin daily, and his intake seems to have been equal though not identical. The wonder is not that Lynne died but that her husband survived. When suffering from dyspepsia he tried to reach crisis point via a midnight supper of cold ...”

“... is among the great institutions of which the Prime Minister and her fellow radicals disapprove. As Norman Tebbit has growled, it ‘is there to look after foreigners’. Mrs Thatcher’s first Administration (1979 to 83) enjoyed two successes: the settlement of the problem of Rhodesia, which had frustrated her predecessors, and the recapture of the Falkland ...”

“... muse in tow, or by themselves, they kinged it in smoky pubs. Hard to imagine the sly and brilliant Norman MacCaig whingeing on about his masculinity. Now, however, earlier feminist explorations are being rediscovered in the late stories of Margaret Oliphant and the novels of Willa Muir and Catherine Carswell. Young women writers are finding that they have a ...”

“... remain so bitter. The United States abandoned the South to its fate in 1991, while General Norman Schwarzkopf was only miles away. Ali Hassan al-Majid, Saddam’s Reinhard Heydrich, oversaw the ruin of the rebellious Shiites’ homes and the torture of their children. Unlike the Kurds, the southern Shiites have remained under Saddam’s rule since ...”