“... The only colour in the rooms was also supplied by the books. He worked on a table of tubular steel and glass. When a friend of mine turned up with a bunch of flowers, he was embarrassed almost to the point of anger. But he was also the sweetest, kindest of men. Foucault’s intelligence and humour shone from his eyes, the luminosity reinforced by the ...”

“... was the son of an architect who had learned his profession under the comfortably traditionalist John Nash, but his own vision, actuated by the ‘throb of possibility’ (lovely, phrase), was engaged with the architecture of the future as embodied in Fontaine’s designs. He was a practical idealist, and the heart of the novel is the fate of his dream. The ...”

“... class system in which he had been raised. Yet he could never claim, like Harold Wilson or later John Major, to be a ‘classless’ political leader, and he had the good taste not to try. When he called himself a radical, it was not insincere, and many of his instincts set him against self-sustaining structures of power and authority. ‘Let us bust open ...”

“... Center has gone, and that others might be coloured by the emergence of the anthrax threat and John Ashcroft’s rise to power. It must have been tempting to introduce a phoney topicality, but with ‘so much fresh outrageousness being manufactured daily’, Franzen allowed himself only ‘minimal tinkering’. For Foden, the difficulties were more ...”

“... that becomes even grimmer in Means’s counterfactual telling. When ‘Hystopia’ starts, John F. Kennedy is still alive and is serving his third term as president. But after six unsuccessful assassination attempts, he’s slipped into the thrall of a death wish, which has him conducting coast-to-coast ‘wave-by tours’ in open-air limos and ...”

“... are logarithms, a type of mathematical operation first described by the Scottish mathematician John Napier in 1614. If you are multiplying a number p by itself to get another number q, the logarithm of q to base p is how many times you need to do the multiplication to reach q. So the logarithm of 8 to base 2 is 3, because you have to multiply 2 by itself ...”

“... on the blue waters of Our Harbour below: cheekily, Our Opera House easily upstages the biggest steel arch in the world. Some think of the Opera House as a superb example of Goethe’s frozen music; others imagine a beached white whale, a galleon sailing off to Elfland, nine ears cocked to hear some heavenly aria, nine nuns playing football. ‘A bunch of ...”

“... nut processing factory where she worked. It was a good job, clean and fairly light compared to the steel mill where I’d been employed the previous summer and, like all food-related work, it had its perks. My favourite nuts were almonds, which I would send through the fryer in illicit batches, mostly for personal consumption, and it didn’t hurt, during the ...”

“... Lawrence. Arthur Lawrence’s younger brother killed his 15-year-old son by throwing a sharpening-steel at him in a fit of rage (the boy was the same age as his cousin David Herbert). Might it not have been male violence, as much as maternal discontent, that made Lawrence ‘abnormal’? Lawrence, like his father and uncle, was given to wild fits of ...”

“... to creature comforts. I wondered, for instance, if the Russians had got round to mineral water. John Sturrock reassured me. ‘Haven’t you heard of Perrierstroika?’ The Writers’ Union is a pleasant one-storeyed 19th-century building set round a leafy courtyard and currently being refurbished against Mr Reagan’s visit. He is to have lunch here. We ...”

“... power, and represented the cutting edge of technology. Their load was carried by tightly spaced steel columns girding their perimeter, braced laterally by each floor deck. The destruction by explosion and fire of columns and floors on several storeys therefore transferred excessive loads to the remaining columns. As these loads became unsustainable, one ...”

“... Few books have done as much to reveal the latent liberalism of the Unionist tradition as John Bew’s The Glory of Being Britons: Civic Unionism in 19th-Century Belfast (2009). Bew challenged the prevalent notion that Unionism was at best a reflex response to Irish nationalism and at worst mere anti-Catholic prejudice. Rather, Bew showed that one of ...”

“... brown and blue containers: HAMBURG SÜD, HANJIN, MOL. Like a monumental Paul Klee hammered out in steel. In Thatcher’s day it seemed a ground-level manifestation of what I took to be her vision of enterprise: deranged scams, small businesses wiped out. And the ghosts of the unions exorcised along with the industries in which they once played a significant ...”

“... with an ANC-ruled South Africa, back within the Commonwealth. If the book has a hero it is Sir John Maud, the British high commissioner who advised in 1960 that since a black government must come to power one day, Britain must ‘keep faith’ with the black majority, while at the same time not antagonising the National Party government to no good ...”

“... a wider sense of possibility. ‘Booms in photography, Sunday film and theatre clubs, Surrealism, steel furniture, faintly obscure poetry’ were among the things Rose Macaulay singled out as characterising the ‘decorative, intelligent, extravagant’ 1920s. In 1919 the Women’s Engineering Society was founded and Nancy Astor became the first female MP to ...”