“... have been involved in simultaneously writing The Pickwick Papers and Oliver Twist, then beginning Nicholas Nickleby nine months before Oliver Twist was finished as relentless monthly serialisation schedules obliged him to meet deadline after deadline. By the time the tenth and last child was born, he was publishing his ninth novel. He was also editing ...”

“... tower is ‘a square prism with pyramidal top in the traditional form of the obelisk’. Pelli is Nicholas Hawksmoor reborn, dominating the eastern reaches of London, the rusty, algae-clogged backwaters of the Lea, with hieratic Egyptian quotations. That New Labour pavilion, the Millennium Dome, is presented as a talisman, ‘covered by the largest roof in ...”

“... on the bandwagon. But the press ignored this. ‘The story was in the bag before I even spoke,’ Nicholas Holgate, Kensington and Chelsea Council’s town clerk, told me. ‘As a civil servant for 24 years and a local government officer for eight and a half years I was trained to be impartial, objective and evidence-driven. None of that was evident in the ...”