“... Griffin spoke in the autumn at a meeting in Heckmondwike, which boasts the boastful BNP councillor David Exley, he called North Kirklees (Dewsbury’s administrative district) ‘the jewel in the BNP crown’. A local reporter tells me there were 7000 votes cast for the BNP in the local elections, and 5066 this year in the general election. He says they’re ...”

“... Frampton, Hal Foster and Charles Jencks, but also by significant outsiders, from Vattimo to David Harvey, from Richard Sennett to the late Ernest Mandel). A substantial critical essay on the work of each of the 24 architects is accompanied, as though in rebuttal, by quotes from that individual’s own writings and sometimes from more favourable studies ...”

“... to accompany him and his longtime companion Howard Austen as they stroll through Washington’s Rock Creek Park Cemetery to pick out burial plots. Kaplan accepts, crafting his own angle. If Vidal expires before he completes his book, he reasons, he can use this tour as material. ‘It is one of the rewards for having foregone my preference that my subject ...”

“... to the whole area of British intellectual life which lies between applied science on one side and rock bands on the other. He did subsequently accept an invitation from Neil MacGregor to speak at the British Museum, which was the last occasion on which I observed him close to (it was the day Saddam Hussein had been captured, which may explain why he was ...”

“... The bank was instrumental in the rise of the modern British state and its global reach, but as David Kynaston shows in his official history, it has always had an uncertain relationship with the state, mediating awkwardly between the private imperatives of finance and the public demands of politics. When the bank was founded in 1694, its business was to ...”

“... between Sybille Bedford’s thirty-year-old life of Aldous and the awaited definitive biography by David Bradshaw. With the passing of time, Murray can tell us things prohibited to his predecessor by discretion and the libel laws. At the same time, like Murray’s other biographies, this one holds the central ground of its subject very ably and maintains a ...”

“... sometimes I think I’m telling the truth when I’m not) … ‘The sea drenched the rock’ is so perfectly simple and so good. Lowell replied: ‘Your suggestions on “Water” might be great improvements.’ The poem finally read: It was a Maine lobster town – each morning boatloads of hands pushed off for granite quarries on the ...”

“... Look! You are nothing at all. Just a crack where the light slipped through … Now our enemies rock with laughter. And she runs mad for joy – that creature in the shape of your mother – how often you said you would come one secret evening and cut her throat! But our luck cancelled that, whatever luck is. And instead my beloved, luck sent you back to me ...”

“... referendum desired by Alex Salmond, but were forced in the two-option referendum permitted by David Cameron to choose between the stark alternatives of Union or independence.* In the latter stages of the campaign, as Devine warns his readers, he lent his name to the ‘Yes’ camp. But Devine is diffident about venturing into the political arena, and in ...”

“... with gender and sexuality; her education; her traumatic rejection by the New Haven Women’s Rock Band for admiring the Rolling Stones; her subsequent alienation from the women’s movement; her failure to make it in the academic world; her long exile in Philadelphia; her triumphant return. As she recently announced to a bemused audience at Princeton ...”

“... Will not reign long as Amnesty’s new chief. Placed under stress he has been known to warp, As David Astor points out with some grief. I must say that Thorpe’s nerve gives cause to gawp. A decent silence should not be so brief. One does feel he might wear more sober togs And do things quietly in aid of dogs. Marcus Aurelius said there’s an age ...”

“... girls, swearing, having it in for people and doing impressions of what Bradford calls Lord David Cecil’s ‘upper-middle-class drawl’. By the standards of the time their jokes had a punk rock aspect – Amis wrote fondly years later of the days when saying ‘fuck’ counted as ‘the breaking-out of a miniature ...”

“... Valentino got to ‘strut half naked in another prolonged dressing scene’. Leider disagrees with David Bret’s claim, in Valentino: A Dream of Desire, that Valentino was ‘a closeted gay man whose close friendships with men involved sex . . . and that Natacha was exclusively a lesbian who enjoyed setting up her husband with other men.’ Yet she ...”

“... telephone cables. It also occurred to him that he ought to be wearing a hard hat, as the rock-faces hadn’t been secured with concrete.’ These sensible observations, made while running through the dark in pursuit of a man who likes to drink pigeons’ blood, are fairly typical of the current wave of Nordic crime fiction. Even while uncovering the ...”

“... with the startlingly realistic images of people and animals found on cave walls in Europe and on rock faces in Africa. They suggest that visual art can draw on an ability to find pleasure in representation that is as old as the human race, and that the move from schemata to images which depend on detailed observation came very early. Both Gombrich and Bell ...”