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“... writer of his age. As eldest son he did most of the ploughing and stump-digging on the family’s virgin land and split a hundred fencing rails a day from their knotty oak timber: ‘I was proud of my skill and tried to believe that I was as tough as the timber I mauled, though this and other heavy jobs stunted my growth and earned for me the title “runt ...”

“... has been in ashes, the most esteemed English architect of his time, whose death on New Year’s Day 1944 was mourned as if an emperor had passed, now returns in triumph to his phoenixed pedestal. That is the message of this torrent of books which have recently gushed from the architectural presses, pouring praise on Lutyens and his works. Written ...”

“... the pathologies of the 1980s had been established. As Dominic Sandbrook points out in Never Had It So Good, the first volume of his monumental history of Britain since 1956, big guns like Norman Tebbit continued to lambast ‘the insufferable, smug, sanctimonious, naive, guilt-ridden, wet, pink orthodoxy of that sunset home of the third-rate minds of that ...”

“... Richard Rayner’s The Blue Suit is a memoir, a work of non-fiction. In it his father dies several times: of cancer, in a car crash, missing presumed drowned and, finally, of a heart attack. He makes guest appearances in between, as a sick man in Scotland, as a diplomat in Australia, as a stepfather. These events all form part of a story, a sort of Arabian Nights of the confessional, in which Rayner admits his real life to his girlfriend (‘one confession veiling the next’), and the whole truth turns out to be a narration of the lies he has told ...”

“... as itself. The outline of surviving myth is re-recognised in the lives of each generation. It’s an instrument by which people simplify, rationalise and retell social complexities. It’s a means to haul the abstract, the global and the relative into the realm of the concrete, the local and the absolute. It’...”

“... sort of creatures the bones had supported, whether any of their living kin were nearby and, if so, what sort of threat they presented. The bones were similar to an elephant’s, but no one had seen anything like an elephant near the Ohio River, or indeed anywhere in the New World. Perhaps the animals had wandered off to the uncharted wilds out west? No one ...”

“... now published as At the Same Time to be her final collection of essays. After that, says her son, David Rieff, in his foreword, she intended to get on with what she most valued, writing fiction. Edited by her, somewhat differently no doubt, this would, then, have been her next book. As it is, published two years after her death, and put together by Rieff and ...”

“... less cuddly than dolphins, lacking the apocalyptic quality of the hole in the ozone layer. That’s probably why they’re surprised to see me here: an accompanying wife, and a writer too. ‘What have dump sites to do with literature?’ they ask. In fact, I used to do technical translations that had to do with waste so I ...”

“... about as ‘lifelike’ as the frigid give-and-take we find in Compton-Burnett, or in Valéry’s Dialogues – does have its persuasive power. For the while at any rate, we are transported to a pastoral domain where reminiscence, opinion, gossip and verbal playfulness are indulged for all they are worth. And, in Stravinsky’s ...”

“... In​ August 2006 I visited an architect friend called David Martin who lived near the town of Montignac in the Dordogne. He was in the middle of a complicated job converting the interior of a nearby château, which had been acquired by a wealthy Japanese client. One evening he produced a large and rather dirty wooden crate ...”

“... settle for being remembered for what was said to them as opposed to what they said themselves. David Livingstone went through hell before arriving at Lake Tanganyika in October 1871, but his stories about that journey would never enter the language the way Stanley’s would, when he caught up with him at Ujiji. Fourteen ...”

“... to Sabine Rewald, by two sepia drawings of his studio windows with the River Elbe beyond by Caspar David Friedrich. The drawings are exact in their rendering of casements, panes and the gradation of light on bare walls, and careful in their delineation of the distant riverbank. The frugal medium and the impersonal quality of the draughtsmanship give you the ...”

“... at MoMA again (until 14 May). At the time the show opened, Rivera was acknowledged, along with David Alfaro Siqueiros and José Clemente Orozco, as a leader of Mexican muralism, which was supported by the new government of Alvaro Obregón as a way to promote a transformed sense of Mexican identity through public art. This new identity would yoke an ...”

“... the premises I think now occupied by the Café Espana. There hadn’t really been any men’s fashions before 1960; most of the people I knew dressed in sports coat and flannels, as some of us still do; but when I first saw Peter he was wearing a shortie overcoat, a not quite bum-freezer jacket, narrow trousers, winkle-picker shoes and a silk tie with ...”

“... discovered on coasts from Norway to the Mediterranean. It grows up to six centimetres long, has a brown or white shell and a speckled body that may range in colour from grey to orange. In sheltered bays, these molluscs settle into fine, soft mud or muddy sand, where they mate in undulant chains, half a dozen at once. When disturbed from their orgies, the ...”