“... advanced are exactly the same as those of the equally sincere worshippers who wanted the stained-glass windows smashed in the 17th century or the rood loft removed in 1559. It didn’t suit their style of worship either. 4 July, Yorkshire. To Menwith Hill just outside Harrogate, where the veteran campaigner Lindis Percy has asked me to take part in an ...”

“... Style reached its glory period with the vertical cities designed by Sullivan, Mies van der Rohe, Philip Johnson, Henry-Russell Hitchcock. The Philadelphia Savings Fund Society Building, the Rockefeller Center, the UN Secretariat Building, Lever House and the Seagram Building were visually stunning statements of corporate power and prevailed by making the ...”

“... speech in the poetry of Sylvia Plath, as you can see the reef below you if you move over it in a glass-bottomed boat. Yet Plath seldom assumes the regularities of absolute metre. Auden’s and Fenton’s poetry employs regular metre and rhyme on many occasions, but does not seem archaic, whereas much of Other Passports (and not just the necessary journeyman ...”

“... journal. They also struck me as a bit chippy – like Iofur Raknison, the armoured bear in Philip Pullman’s His Dark Materials who wants to have a daemon of his own, so he too can be human, but has to be content with playacting with a puppet. But I have to admit that, after attending to their shouts and murmurs, I’ve been won over to their view. In ...”

“... so she must be fine. She and Charles signed the register on a little table below a stained glass window bearing the legend of George V and the year 1951, when Charles was three years old and his mother was four years married, still a princess in a world before British steel bands and Cliff Richard. ‘Here they come,’ the BBC said. ‘Oh, they look a ...”

“... poems appeared he appalled friends by marrying Jane, the daughter of a stable keeper, and then got Philip Webb to build the Red House for his family just south of London. Although once canonised as the first modernist dwelling on account of its simple layout and truth to materials, Morris described it as ‘very medieval in spirit’. Perhaps too ...”

“... have often thought that your father would have been a happier man if he had taken an occasional glass of whisky, as I do.’ Derry is ebulliently confident of soon tasting the fruits of high office.27 March 1997. Seated next to John Prescott at lunch at the Chamber of Shipping. Am careful not to mention the last occasion, which I’m sure he has ...”

“... chemical work and to his close reading of beloved texts. He read, he says, ‘with a magnifying glass’; it was ‘a pitiless exercise’. This is a man who could find in the ‘fine structure’ of Manzoni’s The Betrothed – the great 19th-century novel to which he returned again and again as his appetite for new books diminished – a tiny physical ...”

“... My mother is such a bloody rambling fool,’ wrote Philip Larkin in 1965, ‘that half the time I doubt her sanity. Two things she said today, for instance, were that she had “thought of getting a job in Woolworth’s” and that she wanted to win the football pools so that she could “give cocktail parties” ...”

“... street where it once stood, and the disused Victorian warehouse (‘Geo. Farmiloe & Sons, Lead & Glass Merchants’) that more or less marks the spot. But what does survive is the written record, and within it the throng of petty offenders who passed through here, accused rightly or wrongly of picking pockets, filching cloaks, making affrays, calling ...”

“... system formally and informally structured in their favour. Cicero, however, broke through one glass ceiling after another, even managing to get elected consul, the top job – the first time an outsider had managed such a feat in thirty years. He got there not through populism or breathtaking military victories, but by means of his extraordinary talent ...”

“... among university lecturers; some of them, like his colleague in the University of Wittenberg Philip Melanchthon (‘Black-Earth’, from his original surname, Schwarzerdt), kept this name for the rest of their lives. In Dr Luther’s case, though, the new surname was also a devout play on words, reflecting a sense of the liberation which came from his ...”

“... each side are poetry books and typescripts loosely piled, sharpened pencils, and two glass ashtrays, well filled, a bottle of Scotch, a gentle Tomintoul with an inch remaining, a crystal tumbler, a dead fly on its back inside, several aspirins lying on an unused tissue.’ The narrator’s real-time reconstruction of events is immediately ...”

“... the modernist Cologne/Bonn airport and, in Schütte’s description, the ‘purist steel-and-glass skyscraper’ of the Mannesmann engineering company HQ. Presumably there were a lot of commissions to juggle, as nearby Cologne, like so many other postwar European cities, was ‘one vast field of ruins’.Hütter and Schneider would later talk as if the ...”

“... they tell of how much sleep has been missed, but because they bring the next day nearer. As Philip Larkin, poet of limits, knew so well, sleep has the one big disadvantage that we wake up from it: ‘In time the curtain edges will grow light,’ he wrote in ‘Aubade’, bringing ‘Unresting death, a whole day nearer now’. For Tristan and ...”