“... marks by extending his ‘argot’ to embrace ‘embargo’. For all his ingenuity, however, the Grand Old Man did not use ‘farrago’, a term which Daphne Bennett’s new biography shows to have been singularly apposite. Although Margot wrote no fewer than seven assorted books about herself, she has hitherto lacked a full-scale biographical appraisal. One ...”

“... massively laid for a banquet, for instance, or massed ranks of family photos ranged on top of a grand piano, with royal visitors given some prominence. Even when I am interested but want to be left alone with the pictures or whatever, I have learned not to show too much interest as this invariably fetches the guide over, wanting to share his or her ...”

“... book spawned a new genre of British travel-writing, nicely described as ‘motoring pastoral’ by David Matless in Landscape and Englishness (1998). Motoring is imbued with an almost celestial quality in this very British yoking together of nostalgia and modernity, as if the car, for those with the means to own one, had opened up a gateway to ...”

“... Patrons are patrons,’ a citizen of Florence wrote to the Grand Duke, Ferdinando de’Medici, in 1602: ‘the patron is accountable to no one.’ But what exactly was a patron in Florence or elsewhere in Renaissance Italy? Despite the existence of a large literature on art patronage, the question received few direct answers till the publication in 1981 of a book focused on England: Patronage in the Renaissance, edited by Guy Lytle and Stephen Orgel ...”

“... caught making ‘an unofficial trip to Central Terminal’ – which in some ways is quite like Grand Central Station – ‘for unofficial reasons’ on his way into the office. But then the detective whose clerk he is, Travis T. Sivart, isn’t exactly like Spade or Marlowe either. (His name, as well as being a palindrome, is a homophone for ‘travesties ...”

“... Rainbow, Salisbury Cathedral’ from ‘Various Subjects of Landscape’ after John Constable by David Lucas (1837) The uses of adversity are sweet as well as bitter, as the old Duke in Shakespeare almost said, and what is best about Constable, Gainsborough, Turner and the Making of Landscape is probably as much a result of hard times as what is not so ...”

“... with the censor. In this struggle, writers portrayed themselves with sly disingenuousness as David confronting Goliath. In reality, most writers believed that they, and not the state, would have the last word. And so it has proved. Ben Jonson’s lines are apposite: Nor do they aught, that use this cruelty Of interdiction, and this rage of burning; But ...”

“... and not simply about members of religious orders: Benedictines do not seem to suffer from it. David Knowles wrote a history of the monks and friars in medieval England that was instantly recognised as a masterpiece, but I can’t quite see a Jesuit pulling off something similar – though on a smaller scale John O’Malley’s The First Jesuits ...”

“... of the voters had left their quiet houses, voted ‘No’, gone home and shut the door. At seven David Cameron was on the radio. He intoned the words ‘our United Kingdom’ so many times I thought I’d be sick. Whose United Kingdom? Theirs. The Eton Mess and their cronies. Big Business. Neocons. The warmongers. Not ours. We left Edinburgh at ...”

“... paved surface, apparently calming the anomic habits of drivers in the process. The book’s grand proposal was the total reconstruction of the area around Tottenham Court Road via a system of concrete street decks with motorways underneath. As an architect, Woodward is best known for his work as part of the Milton Keynes Development Corporation ...”

“... of a proxy army. Although the invasion of Iraq was conducted by traditional armed divisions on a grand scale – nearly 180,000 troops from the US, UK, Australia and others – the occupation that followed devolved into an exercise in proxy management. The temptation to use direct military force to contend with the provocations of another state is ever ...”

“... R. to Cardiff to see his grandmother on a potentially difficult day as it’s also the day of the Grand Slam rugger match between Wales and France. The train is very crowded and he sits in Weekend First next to a middle-aged French couple who he assumes to be fans, but with nothing in their behaviour that gives any clue. However, just before the train arrives ...”

“... of a conceit for classifying different areas of poetics. After identifying discussion of the grand principles of poetics with the drawing-room, analysis of particular hypotheses about poetics with the kitchen, he then says that with the notion of genre ‘we now come to the bedroom, where the really important things happen, and we are face to face with ...”

“... invention of powered flight is so familiar that it’s easy to think we know all about it. David McCullough’s excellent biography The Wright Brothers brings the story back to life with facts that the non-specialist either doesn’t know or has blotted out with a misplaced broad brush. Yeah yeah, we get it: the brothers were provincial tinkerers who ...”

“... An ocean-going navy is not a workaday public service, like a coastguard or a constabulary. It is a grand project, an ambition, a national glory or a national shame. Its power is hard-gained and fragile; its reputation can be won or lost in an afternoon. The worst of the winds and tides it has to face is the storm of public opinion, which can blow through the ...”