“... By June, the hunt for sorcerers had gained force. It was led by two formerly church-avoiding men, John and Marcus. Bratrud was present when some children told the men about their visions: Ralph tapped me on the shoulder and I bent down to hear him say: ‘I see two swords surrounding us in this place. The swords of God’s angels. Nothing can touch ...”

“... permission to use the runnels and platforms for The Vertical Line, a performance piece devised by John Berger. In Ways of Seeing, Berger presented on television for the first time an ideological analysis of art and aesthetics. One of the programmes juxtaposed pin-ups and centrefolds with Titians, in a powerful early assault on advertising. Thirty years ...”

“... sleepy American suburbs, writing divorce scenes symbolised by the very slow washing of dishes. Had John Updike been African, he would have won the Nobel Prize twenty years ago. I feel sure that his material hobbled him. Shillington, Pennsylvania simply did not measure up to his extravagant gifts. The absolute distinction made here between a writer and the ...”

“... Reunion headquarters was the Harvard Freshman Union, constructed around an immense, long dining-hall where, as first-year students, we had taken all our meals together before dispersing to the Harvard Houses. I arrived to find a throng of apparent strangers holding drinks, but soon familiar faces appeared. Many of my classmates, I thought, looked remarkably ...”

“... covered the walls where I had tried to steady myself. A pungent smell filled the air. Down the hall in the bathroom she found two damp bath-towels stained with blood. I was in the kitchen, sprawled face-down on the floor. Blood had congealed in a pool round my head. In a panic Gilly tried to sit me up but my movements were unco-ordinated and my speech ...”

“... John Singer Sargent has often been accused of lacking a soul. Even Henry James, who helped introduce him to the London scene in the 1880s and continued to promote his work, worried that he suffered from a ‘sort of excess of cleverness’. The fact that Sargent catered to a transatlantic clientele of celebrities and nouveaux riches at the height of the Gilded Age only encouraged the imputations of superficiality ...”

“... 1958, the original Campaign for Nuclear Disarmament held its inaugural meeting in the Central Hall, Westminster. I offered to speak, and my offer was accepted, though rather casually: I was put at the bottom of the list when all the great figures such as Bertrand Russell and Michael Foot had gone home: However, for some reason I put the audience in a ...”

“... has withered and the sunshine faded. The death toll recorded by Roy Strong, Marcus Binney and John Harris in The Destruction of the English County House tops nine hundred, and few writers set contemporary novels in country houses as they did only a generation ago. One gratifying consequence is that it has finally become possible to view country houses ...”

“... jet plane curtsying in its skirts of noise’ is a random example; ‘the concert hall with its lamps trembling in triumph like the train-ferry when it puts in’; blue wind-flowers that ‘shoot up out of the brown rustle of last year in overlooked places where one’s gaze never pauses’; or ‘It’s spring 1827. Beethoven/hoists his death ...”

“... Peto took 7 Collingham Gardens himself) lived like merchant princes. (Gilbert hung hams in the hall fireplace.) House plans did not change very much, but mansion flats brought new demands; among the most interesting of the many excellent drawings are those showing the hydraulic lift in Abingdon Mansions. Contemporary photographs of the Underground stations ...”

“... Like many others I have been puzzled by the reaction to John Smith’s death. It was reported as though it were at least that of a prime minister, and his funeral was, as the BBC noted, in effect a state funeral. The decision of both the BBC and ITV to double the ordinary length of their evening news broadcasts on the day of his death could be put down to the social democratish inclinations of the programmers, but the speed with which the coverage had to be assembled suggests that it was more instinctive ...”

“... guerrilla footage of the real Boris Johnson jabbering on his cell phone and wobbling towards City Hall, as well as faked sequences of a clown with an unshorn flop of albino hair stunting around underpasses and concrete ramps. The Tebbit sound-bark has come back, to remind us how neatly bogus bicycle rhetoric chimes with agitation in the streets, with the ...”

“... the mad at Bicêtre asylum in 1793 (a much celebrated event that never actually took place), or John Conolly abolishing the use of restraints on his arrival at Hanwell asylum in London in 1839. As John Foot stresses throughout his exemplary account, myth and reality aren’t easily separated in Basaglia’s story. The ...”

“... his courage. That was several months ago. When I went back recently, this part of the exhibition hall was empty and the gloomy photographer had gone. In the early days of the crisis over Kuwait (the authority for this is Yasser Arafat, who has a house here and spent much of his time with Saddam after the invasion), the President thought the Americans would ...”

“... second published novels, drew heavily for inspiration on Wuthering Heights. The Tenant of Wildfell Hall has a doomed gathering whose names all begin with H. Jane Eyre has the unquiet invisible ghost of the red room, and – more significantly – the preoccupation with food, starvation, sustenance. Considering how bad The Professor is – it was the only one ...”