“... flat roofs, which would become a much visited emblem of the International style. The new three-storey studio block had a huge glass wall – it was nicknamed the ‘aquarium’ – through which you could see the students at work. The school was an incubator for the new, modern individuals Gropius hoped to create; the theatre, directed by Schlemmer, was at ...”

“... landmarks were valued, even worshipped, and people were impelled to carve and erect the liths to mark and celebrate them. We do lift up our eyes unto the hills. We use them to guide our ways by land and sea. We are relieved when the next rise of land comes into sight. Hills are perfect sites for burial grounds, and giant calendars, or to celebrate a solstice ...”

“... longer could any city claiming to be civilised allow its skyscrapers to pile one raw, steel-framed storey on another. Instead, they had to have a stone-clad base, middle and top, in attenuated mimicry of the temple-front. No longer could Louis Sullivan, that intellectual loner among American architects, coax businessmen into lavishing his ...”

“... imagined that a Briton’s (or at least an Englishman’s) perfect living arrangement was a two-storey cottage with a garden front and back. If the ‘garden cities’ of the Home Counties were the happiest consequences of this idea, then Moorepark, the subject of Sean Damer’s study, must be one of the saddest. Moorepark is not the most infamous of ...”

“... account with his present concerns. Think of the confrontation between Philip Johnson and Mark Rothko, for example, both at the pinnacle of their professions in the 1960s. Rothko had always been fond of Valéry’s remark that to walk into a museum was like listening to ten orchestras all playing at the same time. He was never happy taking part in ...”

“... out of your life carries less of a stigma than lager or Grand Theft Auto. It’s understood as a mark of educated cultivation, not wilful indulgence or evasion. Yet reading, like every other exercise of the imagination, can be abused, can turn into an addiction. The connection between this and other kinds of abuse is something that Peter Rushforth has been ...”

“... On​ a sunny afternoon last month Ryan arrived at the Thistle, a one-storey pebbledash building in the east end of Glasgow.* The Thistle is the UK’s first Safer Drug Consumption Facility (SDCF). Ryan is a regular there. He wasn’t its first customer – three men raced one another to the door on 13 January – but he comes often enough to have claimed injecting booth eight in what looks like a chorus-line dressing room, with bright lights and tilted mirrors so the nurses can supervise users without intruding on their privacy ...”

“... One of the two plays in the repertoire was a farce Dickens co-authored for the occasion with Mark Lemon. All the while Dickens continued his management of Urania Cottage, Angela Burdett Coutts’s home for the reformation of prostitutes, supervising it daily on the most minute matters. He was constantly visiting magistrate’s courts, prisons and other ...”

“... the head of the movement for reform in London. (They also led to A New London, a book written with Mark Fisher, then Labour’s Shadow Minister for the Arts and Culture, which was essentially the Labour Party’s environment manifesto for the 1992 election.) In 1995, Rogers became the first architect to deliver the Reith Lectures. He spoke about the radical ...”

“... complex’. Her father, Edward O’Connor, was an estate agent, and she grew up in a four-storey house in Savannah, Georgia, but she seems to have chafed against the gentility of her surroundings. ‘I was born disenchanted,’ she later said. Aged ten, she wrote a book called My Relatives. According to her mother, Regina, ‘no one was ...”

“... Their language is different, and so is their subject matter, but their approach resembles that of Mark Girouard thirty years ago in Life in the English Country House. The book’s splendid illustrations make it a pleasure to turn the pages, but the text itself is uningratiatingly printed in smallish type, with two columns on each page. Moreover, Hamling and ...”

“... their pleasure and their politics. Their homes, however, remained some of the worst in Britain. Mark Hudson’s Coming Back Brockens – subtitled ‘A Year in a Mining Village’ – extends this anti-heroic narrative, though from the standpoint of a travel writer and a man of letters rather than, as in Beatrix Campbell’s case, that of embattled ...”

“... Dr Leavis’s admiration for T.F. Powys, Dylan Thomas spoke of the little village of ‘Upper Storey’: ‘a small, lunatic area of Wessex, full of saintly or reprehensible vicars, wanton maidens, biblical sextons and old men called Parsnip or Dottle ... Everyone in this sophisticatedly contrived bucolic morality, has his or her obsession: Minnie Wurzel ...”

“... been the case.The hutments, Geraldine explained, were temporary housing. They consisted of single-storey dwellings built, according to a surveyor’s report, ‘with slight weatherboarding’ on the outside and finished internally with ‘Uralite slate’. They were put up during the First World War to accommodate the workers at Woolwich Arsenal. It must have ...”

“... Dickens as he did. Long out of print, his life is now reissued by Cambridge University Press to mark Dickens’s bicentenary. John Sutherland has added them up: there have now been at least 90 biographies. Claire Tomalin’s Charles Dickens comes just two years after Michael Slater’s excellent Charles Dickens, the first to benefit from the complete ...”