“... has gone horribly wrong, and the solace the authors find in the architecture of Caruso St John or Eric Parry does not make up for it. No guide to London’s architecture has ever been so successful. Regularly updated from top to bottom every decade or so since its first publication in 1983 it obviously fulfils a need. There is no shortage of guides to ...”

“... Smith Institute for the Criminally Insane, banging the same drum in the Independent. Not long ago John Bird and John Fortune did a sketch about the privatisation of air. These days it scarcely seems unthinkable. 28 February. There have been football riots in Bruges, where Chelsea have been playing, with, responsible for ...”

“... his suffering by marrying the princess, he is married to a beautiful movie actress. Why, then, has John Keane chosen as the subtitle of his biography ‘A Political Tragedy in Six Acts’? In the Seventies, when Havel was still a relatively unknown Czech dissident writer, Keane played a crucial role in making him known in the West: he organised the publication ...”

“... sensation I had,’ Biden wrote, ‘was best captured in a line I knew from a sonnet by John Milton: “I wak’d, she fled, and day brought back my night.”’Biden became the tragic young man of the Senate, uncertain whether he should resign to look after his surviving children. But in his account the Senate’s old guard welcomed him and gave ...”

“... which believes that the minor vices, such as drunkenness and dirt, ordinarily cohabit with the major virtues.’ The book is especially good in its treatment of the caesura in Dostoevsky’s life, the years 1863-5, which preceded marriage to Anna Grigorevna and the writing of Crime and Punishment. On the other hand, the book is weak on Dostoevsky the ...”

“... ridge, once occupied, river valley to densely forested upper slopes, by Indian tribes, was a major statement of intent from Snyder. ‘We were cash poor and land rich,’ he said. ‘And who needs more second-growth pine and manzanita?’ Alexander Pope, in his upstream exile at Twickenham, laid out garden and grotto as a conceit, an extension of his ...”

“... from Libya, via Turkey, into Syria. The new intelligence estimate singled out Turkey as a major impediment to Obama’s Syria policy. The document showed, the adviser said, ‘that what was started as a covert US programme to arm and support the moderate rebels fighting Assad had been co-opted by Turkey, and had morphed into an across-the-board ...”

“... though his analogy was the bell jar rather than the greenhouse – and proved experimentally by John Tyndall in 1859. In the 19th century it could be seen as unambiguously a good thing: if carbon dioxide and other trace gases didn’t trap heat in the atmosphere, the earth wouldn’t be warm enough to support life as we know it. But there is now far more ...”

“... spray-canned: the one I see regularly denounces 200 YEARS OF WHITE LIES.That line represents a major theme in the contra-centennial opposition. Most Aboriginal leaders are insisting on peaceful and dignified protest; some, peacefully or not, want to tip the re-enacted First Fleet back into the sea. A march (‘for hope, freedom and justice’) is under ...”

“... but once committed to the idea, he was a loyal and stubborn ally. Ashworth introduced Goossens to John Joseph Cahill, who was soon to become Labour Premier of New South Wales. A backroom politician of Irish immigrant stock who dreamed of bringing art to the people, Cahill gave an Australian down-to-earthness to the high-toned support for the scheme, and many ...”

“... names of 15 athletes from track and field, seven from the National Football League and five from major league baseball, including Barry Bonds. The game was up, or so it seemed. It is not hard to understand the reasoning of the track athletes who went to Conte for help, despite all the risks of associating with such a blabbermouth. They were in it for the ...”

“... and West? Orhan Pamuk is frequently described as a bridge between two great civilisations, and his major theme – the persistence of memory and tradition in Westernising, secular Turkey – is of a topicality, a significance, that it seems churlish to deny. His eight novels, the most recent of which, The Museum of Innocence, has just appeared in ...”

“... Craig and Plath by Gwyneth Paltrow. From the early 1970s more or less until his death Hughes was a major hate figure for those he and his sister, Olwyn, derisively called ‘women’s libbers’, who vilified him as the murderer of a great and courageous feminist poet. In 1972 the American poet and activist Robin Morgan published Monster, a book that included ...”

“... found it either natural or politically expedient to enthuse about Europe. I grew tired of hearing Major and then Blair insisting that we were ‘at the heart of Europe’ when we hadn’t joined the euro or signed up to the Schengen Agreement. Politicians never tried to sell Europe to the British people as anything other than an advantageous commercial joint ...”

“... to Italy. Here he first met Edith Oliver, a spinster in her fifties, whose journals are one of the major sources for the life. Her first impression (‘a delightful keen boy who loves talking’) was not to change. He was equally pleased. After his first visit to her house, in the grounds of Wilton, he wrote of ‘darling Edith whom I adore’. She had never ...”