“... Russian novel. Cruising in a public lavatory in Kensington Park, Will saves the life of Charles Nantwich, an 83-year-old gay peer of the realm, ‘the sort of chap who turns up in the lives of other people’. Nantwich is physically frail and prone to ‘blanking’ – sudden mental absences – but he is more purposeful and manipulative than is ...”

“... patron saint of all royal biographers and journalists’. Plainly there is a lot of dead wood to be cleared away. According to Lady Longford, George V was given a diet of Bagehot by Professor J.R. Tanner, of St John’s College, Cambridge; George VI by J.R.M. Butler of Trinity College, Cambridge; and the Queen as Princess Elizabeth by Sir Henry ...”

“... an attempt to pin down every last detail of the argument is that all too often one cannot see the wood for the twigs. But it is not only style that is at work in hindering the reader. Cavell deploys Wittgensteinian resources in order to show us that such problems as that of the relationship of the mind to the external world, or of how we can know what other ...”

“... Doric temple of 1758 at Hagley Park) and Temple Bar (in its present situation in a Hertfordshire wood) are all follies by Headley’s and Meulencamp’s definition. The first, like many of their eye-catchers and shams, is not quite what it seems; the second was a plaything, although also a try-out for the big architecture of the next generation; the third is ...”

“... by ‘left-behind’ voters in the North and the Midlands. The largely white and deprived Burnley Wood ward never returned a BNP councillor, sticking firmly to Labour and the Liberal Democrats. The first Burnley ward to fall to the BNP was picture-postcard Cliviger, in the Pennine foothills. For a while the party represented the Brontë village of Haworth on ...”

“... interactions seemed slower, gentler, somehow permanent, as did their aesthetic of marble, heavy wood, stone, tiles and gold-painted cursive signs – none of the plastic and plaster beloved of today’s builders. During the Gezi protests, I noticed a teenager rubbing with his foot the meringue façade of a mall which covered what once had been a perfectly ...”

“... the massacre was so great that the blood of the slain flowed in a river like the Nile, red as the wood used in dyeing.’ A second assault by Tamerlane in 1401 was even more devastating. While the Tartar hero, famed for his piety, prayed at the shrine of Abu Hanifa, founder of one of the four Sunni law schools, his soldiers put the finishing touches to the ...”

“... her wheel,/And bowl the round nave down the hill of heaven.’ Fellies are the curved sections of wood which make up the rim of a wheel (Old English felg), while the nave (cognate with Sanskrit nābhi or ‘navel’) is the central section into which the spokes and axle fit from different axes. This kind of technolalia turns me on. Using a word like ...”

“... of her friend and also of the period, now just slipping from memory into history. A card with Charles and Diana on the front – under the caption ‘All I want for Christmas is …’ she says, ‘A divorce’; he answers, ‘I wasn’t thinking of anything that expensive’ – was sent in 1987, five years before John Major announced the ‘amicable ...”

“... and there’s certainly something universal about remembering. ‘That Alice Munro, now 81,’ Charles McGrath, her first editor at the New Yorker, wrote recently in the New York Times, ‘is one of the great short story writers not just of our time but of any time ought to go without saying by now.’ ‘Alice Munro,’ James ...”

“... they favoured market-proven painting and sculpture over more experimental and critical forms. Charles Saatchi, an early backer of Hirst, was alert not only to the new investment potential of contemporary art but also to the publicity value of its more notorious players. The art market fell dramatically in 1990, three years after the stock market crash of ...”

“... 1990s. Among these buildings are the Channel 4 Headquarters near Victoria station (1990-94); 88 Wood St (1991-99) and Lloyd’s Register (1993-2000) in the City; Broadwick House in Soho (1996-2002); Chiswick Park, a business park in West London (1999-); Waterside, the corporate headquarters of Marks & Spencer, in Paddington Basin (1993-); and the Grand ...”

“... most celebrated headmasters suddenly, and for no obvious reason, resigned his job. The Rev. Charles Vaughan had taken charge at Harrow in 1845, when the school was close to collapse. There were just 69 boys on the roll (many of whom were seriously in debt to the local loan shark); even by Victorian standards the boys’ lodgings were a health ...”

“... characters – Aaron Burr and the Emperor Julian – as well as in his satires. In Burr, Charles Schuyler, a character invented by Vidal to be this vice president’s biographer, says his subject is ‘a man of perfect charm and fascination. A monster, in short.’ Not unlike the novel’s author. ‘I suspect Cromwell was right,’ Vice President ...”

“... to have vanished.A major source for Stourton is Clark’s letters to Janet Stone, wife of the wood engraver Lawrence Stone, kept under embargo in the Bodleian but available to Stourton in the form of transcripts made before they were consigned to the library. Clark’s true feelings are more likely to be found here than anywhere else. Stourton admits to a ...”