“... but it was still unnerving to have one’s private life put on display. A year earlier Peter Stansky and William Abrahams had published Journey to the Frontier, a joint Life of Julian Bell and John Cornford, who died in Spain a few months before Bell. It is the product of a more decorous school of biography: they didn’t seek out information that ...”

“... and more. In his preface he thanks Adorno, Henry Nash Smith, I.A. Richards, Talcott Parsons and Peter Laslett, among others. The standard caricature of the Cambridge-influenced criticism of the postwar years represents it as blunderingly empirical and cosily parochial: these stereotypes wilt and shrivel when confronted by Watt’s ambitious, analytical and ...”

“... Fuzzy and Jean at school, Miss Educated in Seacliff psychiatric hospital, Waldo to the writer Frank Sargeson, Janetta in Ibiza. Then there was what people said about her: she was dirty, a thief, shy, different, an aspiring poet, ‘a lovely girl, no trouble at all’, officially insane, ‘pleasant to the guests at all times’, the ‘niece who is going ...”

“... of the very best recent criticism of Jane Austen has been in essays (those by John Bayley and by Peter Conrad stand out) but there is one brilliant full-length study, Roger Gard’s Jane Austen’s Novels, that serves as the best possible introduction to her work. And Gard does notice Margaret: he calls her ‘the one completely superfluous figure in Jane ...”

“... leader to complain about the ‘strange dishes’ which weren’t ‘up to English standards’. Frank Forsdick and his men asked for ‘a bit of old English roast beef or a plate of fish and chips’ and beer instead of wine. It didn’t require the commercial vapidities of the Greenwich Dome – a Festival of Britain manqué – to reveal that such ...”

“... was part-nationalised in 1975 – and several banks have been as good as nationalised this year. Peter Mandelson recently said that the £2.3 billion in loan guarantees he unlocked for the car industry were no ‘bail-out’, being intended to promote its ‘greening’, but this was just a fancy way of getting access to £1.3 billion from the European ...”

“... by a more pliable editor. His successor at the Sunday Times had been the excessively fastidious Frank Giles, though he didn’t last long either. Murdoch was quick to tell him that he must leave his desk, and that from now on he would be ‘editor emeritus’, adding that ‘“e” means you’re out, and “meritus” means you deserve it.’ Sometimes ...”

“... and ghost dances. He acquired the services of Ginsberg, Burroughs, Jean-Louis Barrault, Robert Frank, Ornette Coleman and Ravi Shankar. And he called his film Chappaqua. Ferlinghetti’s Aunt Emily removed him from the orphanage when she was taken on as French governess to the daughter of Presley Eugene Bisland, whose father-in-law founded Sarah Lawrence ...”

“... a slight resentment towards translations, and in his clever ‘Poem Waiting to be Translated’, Peter Porter asks: Why not remember the heroes of hard situations, those who answered inquisitors in fresh parables, whose lyrical rejoinders are assembled here in memorial Penguins? Porter is glancing at the work of Zbigniew Herbert and Tadeusz Rozewicz, and ...”

“... urban for its outer-suburban context’. Hatherley is even more ensorcelled by Alison and Peter Smithson’s béton brut behemoth, Robin Hood Gardens in East London (shown above). For him the Smithsons are the real heroes, and a half-century on he reprises Reyner Banham – with dialectical knobs on – by placing them and their fellow New Brutalists ...”

“... extent of supporting ‘moderately repressive regimes’ if they happen to be allies. Accordingly, Peter Stuart reported in the Christian Science Monitor of 29 January that Congressional hearings were likely to be scheduled on the ‘terms of the hostage release agreement...treatment of the hostages...embassy security’ and – as a kind of afterthought ...”

“... the Welfare State. ‘When Democracy builds’ was the title of an ardent and prophetic lecture by Frank Lloyd Wright, Ned’s near-contemporary. But, for Lutyens, democratic government could ‘only work through compromise, leaving its conscience in the hands of accountants’. Hospitals, schools, factories, cinemas and underground railway stations had no ...”

“... its linkages to belief, if one only chooses to investigate it.’ Shortly afterwards, in 1984, Peter Gay, in The Bourgeois Experience: Education of the Senses, published new evidence of sexual hedonism in practice, especially in the record of one joyously sensual upper-middle-class threesome living in the Connecticut Valley at the height of Victorian ...”

“... of her information is fully accurate or complete. It is, for example, careless to place the artist Frank Stella in a travelling delegation of grown men when he would have been about ten years old, and to quote from books without supplying page numbers or publication history. The chapter on CIA infiltration of the art world is riddled with howlers (that John ...”

“... I finish my A-levels. I read the Reverend Richard Wurmbrand’s Tortured for Christ, and Frank Morison’s Who Moved the Stone? I read Nicky Cruz’s Run, Baby, Run, and books by Charles Colson, books which are still in print years after their first publication, Christian megasellers. I also spent a lot of time in prayer, and in daydreams. I was ...”