“... major battles, another information panel, plus eight suits of armour fixed like trophies to the wall. The wood-block floor has been covered with some ‘period-feel’ black and white squared linoleum. The museological debates that such a contrast raises hardly need rehearsing. On the one hand, we readily deplore the stuffy reticence, the wilfully ...”

“... says I am his enemy,’ Irwin wrote, ‘and watch him through the thickness of the wall which divides our houses. One of us must leave. I have a houseful of books; he has an umbrella and a revolver.’ Seasoned readers of Muldoon know all about trying to see through inscrutable partitions: for most of his career he has resisted the temptation ...”

“... street was demolished in 1971, but you can see it clearly in the film 10 Rillington Place starring Richard Attenborough and John Hurt, filmed on location shortly before demolition. The houses had bay windows going all the way down to the ground, and no front steps or front gardens. Number 10 was the last house on the left, jammed up against the ...”

“... a quotation labouring to attain a modicum of reality. Not so much a dry David Hockney splash as Richard Wilson’s site-specific installation 20:50: his tank of sump oil, miraculously transubstantiated into this brilliant new substance, a liquid thicker than jelly but lighter than air. A seductive mosaic carpet across which you cannot walk without ...”

“... Shakespearean actor Edwin Forrest (1806-72), a man described by his admiring modern biographer Richard Moody as ‘the first actor who refused to subscribe to the nation’s cultural inferiority complex’. As The Shakespeare Riots makes clear, however, Forrest was sufficiently affected by this inferiority complex to have spent much of his life telling the ...”

“... Elvis Presley’s top half on the Ed Sullivan Show; John F. Kennedy’s live debate with a melting Richard Nixon; an early episode of I Love Lucy; a dinner-table scene from The Waltons; Neil Armstrong’s One Small Step; the shooting of Lee Harvey Oswald; the pilot show of Roseanne. Each viewer wore headphones; all you could hear was the giggles and gasps. On ...”

“... ring of magnificent castles with which he encircled Wales, a forerunner of Trump’s ‘beautiful wall’ along the Mexican border. Good Queen Bess promoted her trade and navigation acts to develop British control of the seas and of colonial trade. So did Cromwell and the Stuarts in an obsessive sequence of new laws to make sure that English trade was carried ...”

“... displacement. It is clear that an account of follies can extend beyond building fever, castles one wall thick, and unsteady towers commemorating eccentric squires. Headley and Meulenkamp have cast their net wide in ‘some thinly-follied areas’ to allow ‘visitors or locals the enjoyment of fishing something out’. This reflects their own pleasure in the ...”

“... Yet Piano burst into public view with the Centre Pompidou (1971-77), which, designed with Richard Rogers, is the most celebrated of the high-tech megastructures of the period, and today he is also associated with large urban schemes, including the redevelopment of the old harbour in Genoa (1985-92) and Potsdamer Platz in Berlin (1992-2000), as well as ...”

“... to address long-term problems such as climate change. In A Great Disorder, the historian Richard Slotkin argues that the crisis is, however, essentially cultural rather than economic or political. Among the contributors to the steadily intensifying ‘culture wars’ between ‘red’ and ‘blue’ states, and between rural and urban ...”

“... barefoot or otherwise. I then went to see K. B. McFarlane. My special subject in Schools was Richard II so I had been to McFarlane’s lectures on the Lollard Knights; I also had a copy of some notes on his 1953 Ford Lectures that was passed down from year to year in Exeter. I knew of his austere reputation and of his reluctance to publish from David ...”

“... Americans who left the South as part of the Great Migration, seeking what Isabel Wilkerson (after Richard Wright) calls ‘the warmth of other suns’. In 1958 she arrived in Richmond, California, a town in the East Bay, north of Oakland and Berkeley, whose thriving Black communities maintained cultural and affective ties to Southern culture through ...”

“... the fine hairs of the blastocyst inside Liffey had digested and eroded enough of the uterus wall to enable it to burrow snugly into the endometrium and there open up another maternal blood vessel, the better to obtain the oxygen and nutrients it increasingly required.’ The witchcraft, on the other hand, is amateurish: but the reader, along with the ...”

“... creditable. And here figure Mairi MacInnes, Miriam Levine (two), Gerry Loose, Paul Coltman, Richard Dankleff, Robin Ivy, Pete Morgan (two), Phyllis Koestenbaum, Barbara Moore, David MacSweeney (one out of two), Randall Garrison, Donald Stallybrass, Ellery Akers, Peter Abbs, John Hodgen, Andrew Motion, Edwin Drummond, Gregory Harrison, Gordon Mason and ...”

“... hyperbole for someone who, though he was a conscript, never fired a pistol. (Sartre served as a wall-eyed meteorologist in the French army.)The most muddled and disputed handgun episode in modern literary history is the Russian roulette story that Graham Greene told, and retold, to friends and explained in his memoir A Sort of Life. The gun belonged to his ...”