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“... her alone. Take for a final example the renowned physician, collector and charitable benefactor Richard Mead. When Pilkington first approached him for assistance – she was a distant relation of the Irish branch of the Mead family and was going by the name ‘Mrs Meade’ at the time – he humiliated her, deflating her literary aspirations and dispensing ...”

“... of the way human bodies work. Eliminativists say the same thing about beliefs: they’re a nice fiction but not something that stands up to scientific scrutiny.These two options – reduction and elimination – serve as fixed barriers between which Dennett tries to navigate. He doesn’t want to say that our familiar mental phenomena are mere fictions ...”

“... Gasp at the scale model. Blush at the hubris of the promotional displays. Giant blow-ups of ‘Richard Rogers’s original sketch of the Greenwich Dome’ are twinned with ‘a sketch design for a dome by Sir Christopher Wren’. The puny scale of St Paul’s Cathedral is set against the enclosed acres of the tent on Bugsby’s Marshes. ‘This awesome ...”

“... speculative capitalism that gave rise to the semi-Brutalist office and housing projects of Richard Seifert, such as the Anderston Centre in Glasgow, a half-finished and shoddily renovated sub-Barbican of monumental towers connected by walkways across a raised podium. Seifert, as Hugh Casson pointed out, had ‘loyalty to his clients’ where other ...”

“... Elvis Presley’s top half on the Ed Sullivan Show; John F. Kennedy’s live debate with a melting Richard Nixon; an early episode of I Love Lucy; a dinner-table scene from The Waltons; Neil Armstrong’s One Small Step; the shooting of Lee Harvey Oswald; the pilot show of Roseanne. Each viewer wore headphones; all you could hear was the giggles and gasps. On ...”

“... ambitions. Whether they are incoherent enough to constitute a problem is always going to be the nice question. Take George Meredith. No one can regard him as a significant thinker now – almost all of his work is long out of print – but for a few decades at the end of the 19th century and the start of the 20th he was the cutting edge, a highbrow’s ...”

“... with dusters. I don’t mean I want to play Burt Reynolds parts, only somewhere between him and Richard Wattis, say – those are the parameters.’She was a great woman, her performance of ‘Let’s Do It’ at the Albert Hall the stuff of legend. I just hope Noël Coward was still around to see it. I first met her, almost epically, in Sainsbury’s in ...”

“... for the Dauphiné but also a big supplier of timber and iron to the rapidly growing navy, with a nice sideline in textiles and sugar and also shares in the great colonial companies – quite a match for the Rockefellers and Musks of the modern era. Rather than ‘l’État, c’est moi,’ Daniel Dessert writes in his scorching demolition of the Colbert ...”

“... to a friend about his living conditions: I sleep in a double-deck bed with a cowboy from Texas, a nice boy who never finished the third grade, just below me; if I stretch out my left hand I can touch a small dark pleasant Italian, about five feet high; with my right hand I can touch somebody who came from I don’t know where, but he’s just been here two ...”

“... strange name. Yes, Sedgwick says, the name has a historical meaning – Berengaria was the wife of Richard the Lion-Hearted – but otherwise it is a ‘nonsense word’. She apparently does not know that it was the name of a real ship, a famous Cunard ocean liner, on which Cather had returned from Europe immediately before starting work on The Professor’s ...”

“... been all the more impressive. This is the biggest exercise in political rehabilitation since Richard Nixon – with worthier results, it is to be hoped. It has not happened because of any random stroke of luck but, as we have seen, because Jenkins’s course has had a clear rationale. He has had luck, of course, but mainly the sort of luck that ...”

“... the flight, I had a first interrogation. The old man started by saying: ‘We have two faces, one nice and one ugly. We don’t want to show you the ugly one.’ He carried on with questions: ‘What were you doing in Afghanistan? Are you from al-Qaida? Are you a Taliban? Have you been in training camps?’ My answers were just: no, no, no! He started to ...”

“... silence of another race … Hooey Phooey Sing – Long Sing Tung, that kind of place, where a nice-mannered Jap hisses at you … I saw a Jap gardener at work weeding a huge lawn. He was pulling a piece of weed out of the vast velvet expanse and sneering at it the way Jap gardeners do … He had a sort of dry musty smell, like a fairly clean ...”

“... Most of them were developed under Andrew Adonis’s academies programme for New Labour: the Richard Rogers-designed Mossbourne Community Academy in Hackney, which opened in 2004, is one of these, as is Zaha Hadid’s Evelyn Grace Academy in Brixton. The programme was launched in 2000 by the then education secretary, David Blunkett, who explained that if ...”

“... account of his childhood, given the suggestiveness of these incidents. Florence added a few nice episodes, illustrating, for example, his fear of being touched as a boy and in adult life, and it’s sad that these are now buried in the notes at the back, along with her descriptions of Hardy’s appearance and Max Gate. Hardy’s amazement as a child ...”