“... These two books are a reminder that architects do usually test their ideas on themselves first. Peter Moro, who worked for Lubetkin’s practice and designed the Royal Festival Hall’s interiors, was introduced to Greenwich and Blackheath after the war by a pupil, the architect and local resident Trevor Dannatt. Moro was so impressed that he moved to a ...”

“... the galvanised iron relief by Donald Judd wouldn’t have looked better over there, where the green lacquered one was. The two things that struck me most forcefully about him were his innocence – he had, after all, agreed to speak to me ‘off the record’ despite all the horrible innuendoes I had made about him, and his ordinariness, in my Guardian ...”

“... twenty feet high, leaning on his axe above the car park with antlers growing through his green hat and bunions on his toes bulging out of the wood. Goldsworthy’s massive Sidewinder (1984-85), an anaconda of pinned-together spruce trunks, swerving off between the boles of the still-living trees. Families cycle through the forest, tracking down the ...”

“... as myth for a war-ravaged generation; the village at dusk, smelling of woodsmoke, surrounded by green fields; the thatched cottages and rambling gardens; the time-worn historical monuments. This was the land ‘worth fighting for’ in the propaganda of both world wars. That Morton apparently found it, many times over, in the course of his travels ...”

“... of Northern Irish history has, however, come from post-Althusserian scholars like Paul Bew, Peter Gibbon and Henry Patterson,* and their work on the class dynamics of Unionism, as well as the nature of Southern nationalism, leads to very different conclusions: Struggles over the status of the North are no more automatically anti-imperialist than crimes ...”

“... His father, General Vladimir de Staël von Holstein, was vice-governor of the Fortress of St Peter and St Paul, where famous liberals had been incarcerated at the Tsar’s pleasure. His mother came from a more cultivated family, and was related to the composer Glazunov. At the outbreak of the Revolution in 1917, the family was compelled to leave ...”

“... and his refusal to peddle scientistic obscurities when everyday language was perfectly adequate. Peter Wohlleben’s The Hidden Life of Trees takes a similar line when it comes to describing the behaviour of trees, but unlike de Waal Wohlleben is not a professional scientist. He is a forester who has worked with scientists, and it is his decades-long ...”

“... Wordsworth for most would be impossible. To Shelley he seemed ‘a solemn and unsexual man’ (‘Peter Bell the Third’), and even the revelation early in this century that he had a French girlfriend, and French illegitimate daughter, has not altered the stuffy public image of Victorian Poet Laureate and sage of Rydal Mount. If anything can change this ...”

“... 2 Willow Road was presented to the National Trust in the mid-1990s, it was Henry Brooke’s son Peter, the heritage secretary, who performed the ceremony. Ernö Goldfinger’s professional life was full of such ironies. By the 1970s, he was a misrepresented figure, demonised (he felt) for his part in the high rise architectural attack on London. His wish to ...”

“... the ruling party had already chosen its candidates. I almost felt sorry for the smiling face of Peter Odili. British audiences may remember him as the governor of Rivers State in the Niger Delta, Nigeria’s richest state: last year he entertained a Channel 4 film crew in his throne room with Cristal champagne, which costs more per bottle than the large ...”

“... the salaries and places in its gift’. They issued scurrilous leaflets during the 1911 Bethnal Green by-election, which Masterman narrowly won, and joined the Daily Express in smearing him again in 1914, when he lost two by-elections (one after being appointed to the cabinet). The New Witness crowed that Masterman, as the lackey of ‘Lloyd George … the ...”

“... Neal Ascherson, Christopher Hitchens, R.W. Johnson, Ross McKibbin, E.P. Thompson, Tam Dalyell and Peter Clarke. What they wrote seemed excellent to me, with Runciman bearing the palm for aphoristic conciseness. In embarking on a review, also in 1989, of Hugo Young’s biography of her, R.W. Johnson was also concise: ‘personally, she is neither nice nor ...”

“... circumstances – and Messiaen’s widow, the pianist Yvonne Loriod, remarks in an interview with Peter Hill that he was locked in a wash-house all day, not as a disciplinary measure, but with a supply of paper, pencils and dry bread, so that he could compose undisturbed. No one seems to have been at all concerned that he was studying the ...”

“... arts series Monitor in 1962, it purported to follow a day in the life of four young artists: Boty, Peter Blake, Derek Boshier and Peter Phillips. For Mellor, growing up in ‘meagre’ circumstances in the East Midlands, London as the Sixties started to swing was a revelation, ‘a vision of something wonderful’. After she ...”

“... Photographs of the town of Suzdal, taken almost a century apart, show few signs of change: green fields and low wooden houses still surround the Intercession Convent, with no evidence of a Soviet imprint. The new industrial centre of Yaroslavl was built to the west of the old city, so the religious buildings photographed by Brumfield are still bordered ...”