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“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... with the grossly unreconstructed interventions at the recent Conservative Party Conference by Norman Tebbit. Although most of his major works are out of print, Carlyle’s letters, and those of his wife Jane, are in the process of being edited and published. It is a massive task, but they are among the finest literary letters of the century and the ...”

“... as do some of the best-known witch stories – ‘Hansel and Gretel’, ‘Rapunzel’, ‘Snow White’.The Grimms’ ‘Hansel and Gretel’ is not included in the Virago collection, but it contains a vital element which Shahrukh Husain doesn’t fully discuss in her introduction, an element which is not in the least muted by the brother’s sanitisation ...”

“... that hotbed of tedious loucheries, was the undoing of this arrangement. Faith became friendly with Norman Douglas, for whom she typed South Wind – surely the most unreadable book ever to become famous from its Capri associations – and he may have encouraged her into a liaison with a 19-year-old Anglo-Italian boy who fell passionately in love with ...”

“... Gray, cookery is what the open road was to Cobbett or the natural history of Selbourne to Gilbert White. There is, however, a difference: these are women to whom food is not an end in itself but a way of opening up the world. And, indeed, they are all women: this is, at the highest level, a female form. It is unique to Saxon culture, to my knowledge, that the ...”