“... what remained of the formal economy. In 1992 the cigarette manufacturers R.J. Reynolds and Philip Morris began sending cargo planes from Switzerland, Cyprus, Ukraine and Russia to Podgorica. Cartons of cigarettes were transported to warehouses in the port of Bar, put in speedboats that reached Italy in under two hours, and then driven north, unstamped and ...”

“... local schoolchildren, all walking in time to regimental trumpets and the inane jingling of morris-dancers, the Immortal invoked and perhaps appeased by all this partakes at once of municipal worthy, folk hero, national icon, monarch, pagan god, Catholic saint and Messiah. (The last analogy is made all but inescapable by the name of Shakespeare’s ...”

“... harmony with nature, they have done so only by sloughing off the association with cannibalism. In John Boorman’s Hollywood movie, The Emerald Forest, the cannibal Indians are the bad guys, in league with the dam-builders who will flood the forest and dispossess the friendly Indians who are the film’s heroes. This is in line with Lestringant’s general ...”

“... architects is essentially a list (Meades likes lists) of refined barbarians. The pantheon contains John Vanbrugh, Claude-Nicolas Ledoux, S.S. Teulon, William Butterfield, Frederick Pilkington, Dominikus and Gottfried Böhm, Claude Parent, Rodney Gordon, Richard Rogers (in his Gothic moods), Zaha Hadid. Sometimes, as with the Communist emulator of the style of ...”

“... he devoted a great deal of his later imaginative effort precisely to not sounding like he used to. John Bayley, an attentive but sceptical admirer, once shrewdly said of the early Hill manner: ‘The danger with this sort of poetry is that it is the kind that looks like poetry, which need not mean that it is not the real thing, but is bound to raise a certain ...”

“... caught any of Alan Bennett’s Westminster Abbey footage? Bennett, required to audition for the John Betjeman slot, couldn’t bring himself to deliver much more than formulaic world-weariness, a drone like a miraculously articulate David Hockney impersonator. Jonathan Meades does this schtick so much better, performs himself with lip-smacking ...”

“... John Reed,​ witness to the October Revolution and author of Ten Days that Shook the World, seems to have turned against the Bolshevik leaders just before he died in Moscow in 1920. His apostasy was not publicly known, however, and a decade later the American Communist Party, eager to exploit his fame, encouraged the formation of John Reed Clubs in New York and other cities ‘to bring closer all creative workers ...”

“... to what other writers were doing about the war. In 1943, after reading a story about the army by John Cheever in the New Yorker, he wrote to Mackie: ‘The trouble with writing a story about the army is this: people expect something to happen in a story (Cheever supplied things, lots of things); but the whole point of the army is that nothing ever does ...”

“... a panel. He was not in sympathy with the craft-based medievalism of the direct heirs of Ruskin and Morris in the Arts and Crafts movement: he employed joiners and fabric printers to carry out the artists’ designs, and had no objection to second-hand furniture being bought in for painting-up. But attention is not being given to Omega simply because it has ...”

“... even in a world where couples get to know each other first. Hilda Thomas and Thomas James Meredith-Morris, back then in decorous 19 –, wouldn’t have been very well acquainted. In that, of course, they were simply figures of their generation. What made their marriage more than a run-of-the-mill case of domestic estrangement was her refusal to accept her ...”

“... Zionism by a new generation of Israeli historians – among them Ilan Pappe, Avi Shlaim and Benny Morris – whose work is now entering the mainstream. In a sense, by focusing on the Mandate, Ploughing Sand and One Palestine, Complete are considerations of Israel’s debt to the British and Britain’s injury to the Arabs. Shepherd writes that ‘British rule ...”

“... To make a go of it, the factory is importing a complete workforce of nimble-fingered Taiwanese. Morris Chang, father of the Taiwanese chip industry, has predicted nevertheless that such efforts by the US and others will ‘prove a wasteful and expensive exercise in futility’. Of course, it would be equally bigoted to claim that tariffs never work. Little ...”

“... of silence. I was recently struck by this relationship of music to silence when I saw the Mark Morris Dance Group perform ‘Neue Liebeslieder Walzer’ to the music of Brahms. At the end of the work, when the dance has subsided into a circular tableau of figures sleeping in the shadows, at the precise moment when the sound of the last note is about to ...”

“... retrospective in 2000, contains additional valuable information and perspective; of note are Maria Morris Hambourg’s reading of the development of Evans’s early aesthetic sense and Jeff Rosenheim’s detailed study of Evans’s work in the South. Taken together, these contributions work to fill in the vague outlines of one of the most important American ...”

“... the dreams that attached themselves to him. In choosing ‘a well-rounded life’ as his subtitle, John Campbell risks some obvious jibes about his increasingly portly subject, but he delivers on its promise. It is a persuasive, if at times indulgent, portrait of a life rich in satisfactions. At its heart were a long, close marriage and three children, to ...”