“... no respectable architect could build anything with a clear conscience, Koolhaas ridiculed what he took as the sentimentality and impotence of architects whose only response to the tidal wave of business parks and mega-malls overwhelming the globe was to retreat into an autistic obsession with the precision with which doors could be fitted into walls, or the ...”

“... or Otaheite’. The same October week that Grace scrawled out ‘crisis’, loyalist fortunes took a desperate turn when Cornwallis surrendered to the Americans at Yorktown, sealing Britain’s defeat. Within a matter of months, British forces began withdrawing. The Galloways’ predicament was replayed in loyalist households across America. What would ...”

“... series of highlights (Diary and Letters of Madame d’Arblay, 1842-46), they were savaged by John Wilson Croker in the Tory Quarterly Review. Hatchet jobs were Croker’s speciality: it was his review of Endymion that Byron joked was the cause of Keats’s death in Don Juan (‘’Tis strange the mind, that very fiery particle,/Should let itself be ...”

“... Orton and Halliwell pasted a monkey’s head onto Collins Guide to Roses; adorned a volume of John Betjeman’s poems with a photograph of a heavily tattooed, elderly man in swimming trunks; and glued pictures of giant cats onto the cover of Agatha Christie’s The Secret of Chimneys. At about the same time, a related tradition of artists’ books reached ...”

“... deal,’ Raymond Roussel wrote towards the end of his life, ‘but from all these travels I never took anything for my books.’ It’s an odd thing to hear from the author of Impressions d’Afrique (1910) and Nouvelles Impressions d’Afrique (1932). But it makes sense when you consider some of the ‘impressions’ he recorded in his journal during his ...”

“... been dealt with explicitly by other writers: Douglas Dunn, Tony Harrison, Linton Kwesi Johnson, John Agard, Grace Nichols and Tom Leonard, to name a few. For some, ‘literary art’ is a territory to be attained (Harrison’s ‘we’ll occupy/ your lousy leasehold, poetry’), in others a rule-book to be torn up (Agard’s ‘mugging de Queen’s ...”

“... Yeats was prematurely describing her as a woman stricken with age, she had a delirious affair with John Quinn, the American lawyer who was the great, almost indispensable, patron of the Yeats family. Foster, noting that her son, Robert, unlike Sir William, was short, allows himself (hiding the news in a note at the back of his huge book) to report local gossip ...”

“... The first time I took blood from someone it came as a surprise to both of us. All medical students must learn to take blood at some time during their course, but phlebotomy – like other skills requiring the use of sharp instruments – is usually left until the third year. A supplementary class I picked at the very beginning of my studies, however, turned out to include a practical lesson in blood-taking ...”

“... war weaponry; it was a horribly unequal contest. Roaming bands of survivors, heads bandaged, took to the hills; the defeated military attempted guerrilla raids from their shelters on the North Downs. Religion was no consolation. Fundamentalist clergy wandered the back roads and river paths between Staines and Richmond, calling for divine ...”

“... a sinister beauty and the power to inspire wonder. Botting cannot resist borrowing for an epigraph John Masefield’s tribute to the great sailing ships: ‘They mark our passage as a race of men,/Earth will not see such ships as these again.’ This lively book is a zeppelin history which concentrates on the round-the-world voyage of the Graf Zeppelin in ...”

“... the horror. No sooner had Scotland failed to qualify than I was moved to treat my friends to John Steinbeck’s comment to Jacqueline Kennedy: ‘You talked of Scotland as a lost cause,’ he said, ‘and that is not true. Scotland is an unwon cause.’ Bloody hell. Better make mine a double. Five minutes later I was thinking about Ireland and five ...”

“... what you can, control what you can’t,’ has proved congenial for different reasons to John Major and Tony Blair, and to Blair’s heir apparent, Gordon Brown. These men are to Jenkins Thatcher’s political ‘sons’, with David Cameron trotting along behind as a ‘grandson’. (The book was completed before Cameron’s Conservatives abandoned ...”

“... he issued the reminder, Wolfowitz’s hopes of becoming secretary of state in a second Bush term took a nosedive. Marshall wondered whether we are ‘trying to get retribution toward these countries by stiffing them on the contracts’, or ‘trying to come to some sort of agreement . . . to refinance and restructure Iraq’s mammoth foreign debt’? As if ...”

“... I believe that Greene was surprised by what he found in Yonda. Here disease rather than sin took precedence. ‘The priests are more concerned with engineering, electricity, navigation and the like, than with the life of man or God,’ Greene wrote in Congo Journal. Querry ‘has come seeking another form of love and is faced with electric turbines and ...”

“... feminist and other good causes. Yet claims of this kind can distort the fiction itself. When Mrs John Dashwood, at the beginning of the novel, rudely asserts her right to the succession of the Dashwood property, and persuades her husband to drop his plan to give £7000 to the dispossessed girls, the method by which she achieves her purpose has more to do ...”