“... up at the food bank. In the third section, Rachel is at Oxford University, where, in the dining hall of her college, there’s a portrait of a former fellow, none other than Henry Winshaw, sitting at a desk in front of the words ‘FREEDOM, COMPETITION, CHOICE’. Winshaw turns out to have been a mentor to the current rector of the college, Lord Lucrum, who ...”

“... took on a North American look. The dust-jacket shows the austere lonic Portland stone sculpture hall. Spalding observes, justly, that by insisting on the intervention of the American architect John Russell Pope in 1929 the sponsor, Lord Duveen of Millbank, was promoting, against the inclinations of British curators and civil servants, the ‘latest American ...”

“... native ‘Germanic’ peoples with their humane and homely domestic architecture, embodied in the hall-centred house, and the oppressive forces first of the Normans, with their castles, and later the neo-Palladians, who imposed rigid Italianate symmetry. Elizabeth, queen of ‘merry England’, was a Good Thing, ‘just, sensible and far-sightedly ...”

“... rap for the exquisite but evil Margot Beste-Chetwynde, and reflects onthe undeniable cogency of Peter Beste-Chetwynde’s ‘You can’t see Mamma in prison, can you?’ The more Paul considered this, the more he perceived it to be the statement of a natural law. He appreciated the assumption of comprehension with which ...”

“... Ovett style of things) as a ‘cabaret dancer’. Above all, Coe has been coached by his father, Peter, who has impressed himself on the public mind, rightly or wrongly, as a self-made authoritarian gifted with inflexible will, prescient ambition and a strikingly neo-Victorian belief in ‘scientific’ progress. It comes as no surprise to learn from the new ...”

“... that if children drink tap water it will make them transgender.Before going into the convention hall, I encountered Ramaswamy and held up my recorder as he expounded on unity. It takes a truly intelligent man to be so stupid. He wanted to oppose ‘the fake astroturf version of unity’ and go for something real, he said, but he didn’t acknowledge for a ...”

“... she married Roger Bradshaigh, the son of a baronet. The couple took on his family estate of Haigh Hall near Wigan in 1742 and drew a comfortable income from its coal reserves; they remained childless but were busy and happy managing Haigh, and visiting her brother-in-law the Earl of Derby near Liverpool. She heartily disapproved of too much learning in women ...”

“... me Waiting in the Wings, Noël Coward’s play about a theatrical retirement home – Denville Hall, I suppose it is. He wants me to update it, though lest I should think this kind of thing beneath me what he says he wants is ‘a new perspective on the play’.The perspective will have to be a pretty distant one as it now seems a creaking piece all ...”

“... off here and there the note of each species, as if he had been a child left alone in a concert hall with the deserted instruments of a full orchestra. Finding a sealion snoring on the bank of its pool, he rippled the water suddenly. He was a quarter of a mile away when he heard the responding bark.In this vision of an animal meeting neighbours he has never ...”

“... party. He describes these years at the GLC amusingly and, so far as one can tell, frankly. County Hall, the council’s South Bank headquarters, had luxuries that surpassed the palace just over the river. When Livingstone arrived there in 1973, chairs of committees had ‘personal assistants, typists, chauffeur-driven cars, constantly restocked drinks ...”

“... as the guests were leaving the table for coffee, they spotted Rossellini, tiptoeing through the hall. He went straight to bed. Miss Bergman, desperate, tried to get him to come downstairs. ‘Tell them I didn’t come home,’ he suggested unhelpfully. She was left to return to the living-room to make impossible excuses, when suddenly the double doors were ...”

“... landscape at the mouth of the Thames Estuary. I should be out there now. I have been brooding on Peter Ackroyd’s notion that the Thames is a river like the Ganges or the Jordan, a place of pilgrimage, a source of spiritual renewal. ‘The river itself becomes a tremulous deity,’ he asserts. I carried Ackroyd’s epic, Thames: Sacred River, as I made a ...”

“... the other teachers. We had our dinner in a Nissen hut in those days. They called it ‘the dining hall’, as if we were dukes. At the end was a partition, and behind it the teachers ate. Not the nuns – they went home to their own dinner in the convent – but Mrs Parker and Mrs Bacup, and Miss Dowd who taught the babies’ class. In privacy, they set into ...”

“... Chelsea and Westminster Hospital, where, unknown to him, his high-life associate, the film-maker Peter Whitehead, had been taken, after suffering a heart attack. It was one of those mornings of indulgent sunshine, filtered through gauze. Lilies and bell-shaped purple flowers. Twigs. A long pine table which gave Marks plenty of elbow room to roll his herbal ...”

“... a decision to deny them asylum. But even the social security advisory committee set up by Peter Lilley doubted his claim that this would constitute a saving of £200 million. It also warned that ‘extreme hardship’ was likely to result from the legislation. The proposals nonetheless took effect from February. Last month, the Court of Appeal ruled ...”