“... and they do keep cropping up. I think there’s more than a little Pynchon floating around John Kennedy Toole, whose A Confederacy of Dunces is a book nearly as bloated as its protagonist; Don DeLillo’s social, um, satires owe more than a little to Pynchon’s work; and in a recent essay in Harper’s magazine the young novelist Jonathan Franzen ...”

“... Historicism and Cultural Materialism are enterprises which, as products of our Western European or North American presuppositions, prove to be as blindly culture-specific as the societies they describe.’ He is rightly cheerful about this prospect of his own occultation; it is a fate which, like death, he will share with us all. But he hopes that, unlike most ...”

“... flock of pigeons in Washington Square. He knows the birds by name: Big Bosom, Lady Astor, St John the Baptist, Polly Adler, Fiorello. He wanders from saloon to saloon cadging beers, sandwiches and cash. Most important, he adds to his work-in-progress, a mysterious book that he calls ‘The Oral History of Our Time’. This massive, encompassing volume, a ...”

“... Minister for Science and Technology, minister responsible for the problems of unemployment in the North-East (Hogg immediately donned a cloth cap), minister responsible for sport, minister in charge of negotiations with the US and the Soviet Union to get a nuclear test ban treaty signed. This last job brought him into collision with the immensely experienced ...”

“... was intended. At the time of its publication, Rousseau was living in Montmorency, a little north of Paris; friends warned him that he was about to be arrested, and he fled for what he hoped might be the safety of Switzerland. In his Confessions he records one aspect of his flight with some amusement: ‘Between La Barre and Montmorency I met, in a ...”

“... power relations. Hobbes’s ulterior aim was, of course, to defend a form of absolutism, extending John Selden’s thought that, in a household, only one man’s there to buy the meat. But Hobbes’s views about meaning threaten to prove subversive. Counterfactuals – imagined possibilities – can be used to challenge the status quo. Invert hegemony ...”

“... family conspires against the crown. The rebellion known as the Pilgrimage of Grace rises in the North, unhappy with reforms in the Church, and is put down. Henry VIII gets a bad leg, courts multiple possible brides, decides there are heretics both to the left and right of him, then marries Anne of Cleves in order to secure an alliance with German ...”

“... Rotterdam​ city centre sits a few miles inland from the North Sea, its skyscrapers and office buildings lining the New Meuse River, a tributary of the Rhine. A ferry tour takes you past ship repair yards, grain silos, terminals receiving coal and iron ore for Ruhr Valley industries, and even a massive orange juice storage facility that receives its cargo from Latin America ...”

“... make possible the creation of the Roman Catholic Cathedral of Westminster, the masterpiece of John Francis Bentley, opened in 1903 and consecrated in 1910.Barry recognises the significance of the cathedral, even though it is consigned to his epilogue. More than 120 coloured stones from at least two dozen countries can be found there, some of them ...”

“... Dr Richard Barter, who got the measure of cholera twenty years before the more famous physician John Snow. The rising generation of British officials had a special reverence for the Arabs of the desert, with their ‘wild independence’ and ‘manly frankness’. Alliances with the Wahhabi were mooted seventy years before the explorer Captain William ...”

“... construction for more than a decade, and it is only because Young casts his net so wide (taking in John Betjeman’s travel documentaries and the 2012 Olympic opening ceremony among other things) that his choices don’t end up looking a little predictable. For this reason Offbeat is a useful supplement to his book (though it’s much more than that) since the ...”

“... a reassuring feeling of continuity and survival. Now, blocking the view of the vast horizon to the north, there will be that silly bridge carrying more cars to a gigantic third airport. Little of Istanbul – the Istanbul of high-rises, unfinished corporate spires, highways and bare street life that stretches across an area nearly four times the size of London ...”

“... them. In France, the 18th century gave us Chardin, the 19th Corot, and the 20th Braque: all true north on the artistic compass. Their relationship with their descendants is sometimes one of influence, more usually one of semi-private conversation across the centuries (Lucian Freud doing versions of Chardin, Hodgkin painting ‘After Corot’). But it also ...”

“... on a Stratocaster, speaks to violence at home and war abroad. Johnson’s bombing campaign in North Vietnam, which had wound up in November the previous year, was still fresh in people’s minds, and it transpired later that Hendrix had closed out the festival six months – to the day – after Nixon began bombing Cambodia. At the time the American ...”

“... so he concentrated on that. He then had the brainwave of buying the votes of the nine mountain and North-Western states by getting the Southern bloc to support the proposal for a federal dam in Hell’s Canyon (while ensuring that this proposal would fail in the end – the private power companies wouldn’t like it). LBJ was far more than a match for the GOP ...”