“... you with tremendous force: the overall effect is of discreet power.[watch]The British architect Peter Smithson, for one, admired the elegance of the skyscraper, then the most expensive ever built: ‘Everything else now looks like a jumped-up supermart.’ The Seagram Building has since been so imitated that it’s hard to recognise its ...”

“... decrypts poured in from Bletchley, to be mulled over by a team including the legendary Admiral Hall, whose Room 40 in the Admiralty had laid the foundations of modern cryptography during World War One; Stewart Menzies, head of SIS (the model for James Bond’s M); Lieutenant-Colonel Kenneth Strong from Military Intelligence, who had, in 1940, warned the ...”

“... When Lot lived in Sodom and Gomorrah,’ Peter wrote in his Second Epistle, ‘he was oppressed and tormented day after day by their lawless deeds.’ Having grown up in Naples, Roberto Saviano is similarly tormented and oppressed. Gomorrah is his account of the lawless deeds of the Camorra, the Neapolitan Mafia ...”

“... at the hands of the Courtenays in 1455. And if one Lancastrian knight of the shire, Sir Peter Bessels of Berkshire, took the then highly unusual initiative of sponsoring a new monastic college at Oxford, the heretical religious interests of Sir John Oldcastle led to his being burned while hanging (presumably still alive) in St Giles’s Fields in ...”

“... other main target is the argument, advanced most recently and influentially by Catherine Hall and Leonora Davidoff, that the political, social and economic changes of the last third of the 18th century contributed to a widening separation between male and female spheres, between public and private. I share many of her doubts on this score. Yet this ...”

“... for a long time ineffectual) efforts of one local magistrate, Sir Daniel Fleming of Rydal Hall, to secure their conviction. It is an extraordinary story very well told, largely in the words of the original depositions and other papers in the public records and in the extensive Fleming archive. Macfarlane’s principal aim has been to put the present ...”

“... they encapsulate the evolution of Italian Renaissance sculpture, from Brunelleschi’s marble Peter for the butchers’ guild to Giambologna’s bronze Luke for the judges and notaries. The earliest of them are widely considered to be the first free-standing sculptures since those of the Ancient Greeks, and the delicate, perspectively rigorous rilievo ...”

“... Daniel, but the one Marinetti was due to give to an audience of five hundred at the Bechstein Hall on Futurism. ‘“Futurist” Leader in London,’ reported the Daily Chronicle, ‘Makes an Attack on the English Nation.’ If you can’t beat them, join them – or copy them. In 1912 Pound sought some notoriety by launching his own movement, or ...”

“... turning a hair, that Agatha’s madcap elder sister Madge once came down to dinner at Cheadle Hall ‘dressed as a cricketer, in black breeches, cricket cap and shorts’. Even while boggling at Ms Morgan’s conception of a cricketer’s normal attire, one realises that she hasn’t addressed herself to the really important question: how on earth did ...”

“... Bank. Having designed Goddards for Sir Frederick Mirrieless, he followed that up with Overstrand Hall for Lord Hillingdon, his business associate. Such clients were unfailingly won over by Lutyens’s boyish charm and irresistible innocence. ‘He could not spend his money – until he met me,’ Lutyens boasted proudly of the Yorkshire businessman ...”

“... over it? That evening I head out to meet two postgraduate students and pass the new concert hall, a great unfinished globe rising above the docks. We’re in a bar near the Ormeau Road, South Belfast, where I grew up, and the talk turns to the RUC operation that enabled the Orange Order to march through the Catholic Lower Ormeau area on 12 July. Is ...”

“... symphonies now occupy the dead centre of the repertory. This past season, in New York, Carnegie Hall put on the Ninth on a Sunday, the Third the following Thursday, and, about a week later, on successive evenings, Das Lied von der Erde and the First. One loud night in February, the Second and Fourth were done simultaneously, at Carnegie and at the ...”

“... Arnold, who offloaded her onto Axel when he got married. The old grandfather clock in the hall struck half-past seven as I entered avenue de Villiers silently as a ghost. It was the hour when punctually to the minute Mamsell Agata started to rub the patina off my old refectory table in the dining-room, there was a fair chance to reach in safety my ...”

“... case would never have had the nerve to speak to him. I’d first heard his voice in Exeter College hall some time in 1955. The lower end of the scholars’ table where I was sitting was only a yard or two from high table where the dons dined and, hearing those harsh, quacking tones without knowing whose they were, I said to my neighbour that it sounded like ...”

“... candidate in the London Mayoral Election, right across the river from the crumpled buttock of City Hall. Which is neither a hall, nor in the City, but an architectural doodle with the perverse ambition of bringing Manhattan to Bermondsey. ‘We’ve got mile after mile and acre after acre of land for our future ...”