“... Paracelsus: Ills from without extrinsic Balms may heal, Oft cur’d and wounded by the self-same Steel – But us what remedy can heal or cure, Whose very nature is our worst disease. This epigram is not improved by its failure to rhyme in the third and fourth lines. (‘You might have rhymed,’ as Horatio says to Hamlet. Coleridge, a natural rhymer, is ...”

“... the sages of the East. In Sri Lanka, the most influential of these spiritual tourists was Henry Steel Olcott, a former Union Army colonel and theosophist from New Jersey whose profile appears on Sri Lankan stamps and who is claimed as one of the ‘heroes of independence’. After the American Civil War, Olcott grew disgusted by what he saw as the ...”

“... from a photograph of an embalmed armadillo foetus. The direction of travel, accessed by the steel ladders of the Elizabeth Line tracks, led directly to the Marketing Suite and Discover Centre, a tidy bungalow nicely embedded in a private allotment of wild flowers. I was eager to inspect the table model of the Radiant City, but it was not possible. Mr ...”

“... height,’ he said, ‘and the weight of your chin, I’d recommend a hat with a broader brim.’ David Halperin’s new book, How to Be Gay, addresses the mysterious persistence of discredited elements from pre-Stonewall gay male culture. In theory camp should have been rendered obsolete by the arrival of models of gay behaviour not driven by the old toxic ...”

“... at last perfectly illustrates both the universal dilemma and the general solution, this riddle in steel and stone is at once the perfect target and the perfect demonstration of non-violence, of racial brotherhood, this lofty target scraping the skies and meeting the destroying planes halfway, home of all people and all nations, capital of everything, housing ...”

“... but the US consistently supported the Israeli position. One American participant at Camp David in 2000 later said: ‘Far too often, we functioned … as Israel’s lawyer.’ Finally, the Bush administration’s ambition to transform the Middle East is at least partly aimed at improving Israel’s strategic situation. This extraordinary generosity ...”

“... jewellery, and a six inch long marlin hook dangling around my neck on a length of heavy stainless steel chain. I decorated the set by draping my black leather biker jacket over my chair at the panellists’ table. The jacket had handcuffs on the left shoulder, rainbow freedom rings on the right side lacings, and Queer Nation-style stickers reading SEX ...”

“... I visited Boston, in late 2021, the finished barrier was less than a year old. A semi-cylindrical steel gate weighing several hundred tonnes now lies on its side on the riverbed, ready to be rotated by hydraulic rams to block the flow of water and seal off the gap in the town’s defences. Adam Robinson, the Environment Agency engineer responsible for ...”

“... to T.C. Smout in A Century of the Scottish People 1830-1950, Glasgow made ‘one fifth of the steel, one third of the shipping tonnage, one half of the marine engine horsepower, one third of the railway locomotives and rolling stock, and most of the sewing machines in the United Kingdom’. It was the eighth largest city in Europe and called itself the ...”

“... an undeclared nuclear weapons programme. The team was led by an aggressive IAEA inspector called David Kay, though it was not really an IAEA operation but a US one: the deputy chief inspector, the American diplomat Bob Gallucci, called most of the shots. ‘The team,’ Gallucci said in 2001, ‘was very, very special … we had a lot of team members with ...”

“... I mistake it, witnessing in England the gradual disappearance of the old landed classes.’ As David Cannadine remarks in The Decline and Fall of the British Aristocracy, ‘five hundred years of patrician landownership had effectively been halted and reversed in seventy.’ True, if you draw up a list of the great property owners today, the same names ...”

“... of the antebellum regime and a link to the present. Under a large open pavilion eight hundred steel columns hang from rope-like rods, all the same powdery reddish-brown rusty colour as the shackles in the slavery statue. Each of them bears the names of those murdered in one of eight hundred counties. Outside, eight hundred coffin-like replicas of the ...”

“... among others, 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 ...”

“... the frontier. It stands at a height of nine metres, and consists of concrete slabs topped with a steel fence. Sprouting from the walls at regular intervals are slanted metal structures carrying surveillance and thermal cameras, along with other sensors and listening equipment, allowing Israel to keep the Lebanese side under constant watch.I drove the length ...”

“... a champion of privatisation, attributes the dropping of the ‘re-’ to a fellow Conservative, David Howell, one of the back-room Tory ideas men tinkering obscurely with economic models while Edward Heath and Harold Wilson squared off against the unions in the 1960s and 1970s. (Howell was Thatcher’s first energy minister. He is now Baron Howell of ...”