“... number of contributors to the Stachura collection have valuable points to make along these lines. John Conway offers a sensitive account of the German Churches after 1918, showing how they were unwilling and unprepared to meet the challenge posed by the republic, and came to see Hitler as a bulwark against Communism and as a national saviour. Dick Geary ...”

“... Flash sampled it straight back on his own ‘Adventures of Grandmaster Flash on the Wheels of Steel’, I see it more as one of those special memories you get scattered across the history of pop culture, of the happier future that never came). Then out the band went on the road again. ‘I was being run ragged.’ The final Blondie album, The Hunter, was ...”

“... track is 182 bpm (beats per minute) because it takes 182,000 litres of water to make one ton of steel … Sanitation coverage is 53 per cent in Bangladesh, so the track is 5’30” long.’ If that isn’t formalism, what is? You couldn’t ask for a better example of formalism than that ‘so’ and that ‘because’ – as arbitrary as the underlying ...”

“... at a circle of readers in London and New York. (He has evidently succeeded in that aim: the John D. and Catherine T. MacArthur Foundation has just bestowed on him its ‘Genius Award’ – $250,000 with no strings attached.) Edward Kamau Brathwaite is also familiar with that circle, having carried off a Cholmondley Award in this country and a ...”

“... own presidential stature and coat-tails, as well as his incomparable political intelligence. David Steel might, just conceivably, be capable of playing such a role, but Labour would never accept Liberal leadership of a joint Opposition campaign. Which means one is left with Neil Kinnock – who is incapable of playing such a role. Kinnock may be a nice ...”

“... themselves, or to priests or nurses, while the heroic surgeon sawed on. Half a century ago, John Alfred Ryle, the founder of social medicine, declared that one of the mistakes of scientific medicine was to have shelved the problem of pain. With both clinical and humane ends in mind, he called for fresh study. Since then things have indeed improved, but ...”

“... criticism, but dull in the raw: a heap of unsmelted iron ore to Baudrillard’s glistening steel. A similar difficulty dogs some of the later novels, too, of which the clearest example is probably Cocaine Nights (1996). It’s hard to argue with the novel’s thesis that capitalism depends on violence and violent crime to sustain itself and ...”

“... a fact he doesn’t mention in his account of the incident in his memoirs or even in his diary. John McCloy, FDR’s assistant secretary of war, described it as ‘the most gallant thing I’ve ever seen’. Macmillan wasn’t one of those not infrequent war heroes who in peacetime are mild and eager to please. He remained dauntless and daunting in ...”

“... an old bridge. There were diggers pulling and hauling, men in white helmets climbing over steel girders, right in the shadow of a great steeple. The church was fancy, the steeple very high. I thought only television masts went as high as that. The four-arch bridge across the River Irvine was built by a certain Thomas Brown in 1750, for the price of ...”

“... surprise and intensely interesting. Among the good ones are ‘The Old House at Home’, about Old John McSorley and his son Old Bill, who founded and carried on McSorley’s Old Ale House in New York’s East Village; the already described ‘Mazie’ and ‘Lady Olga’; and ‘The Mohawks in High Steel’, which, along ...”

“... by this point driven almost mad by its antagonism towards Europe and its commensurate contempt for John Major – refused to endorse a party and instead chose to support whichever candidate was the most Eurosceptic in each constituency. The result was that the Times encouraged its readers to vote for Jeremy Corbyn in Islington. For much of its history it had ...”

“... caught any of Alan Bennett’s Westminster Abbey footage? Bennett, required to audition for the John Betjeman slot, couldn’t bring himself to deliver much more than formulaic world-weariness, a drone like a miraculously articulate David Hockney impersonator. Jonathan Meades does this schtick so much better, performs himself with lip-smacking ...”

“... vigorously: over-vibrating concrete would shake the gravel to the bottom.’ He finds that even John Betjeman, the arch-Victorianist and founder of Private Eye’s ‘Nooks and Corners’ (originally called ‘Nooks and Corners of the New Barbarism’), admired the design, to the point where he wrote a letter of appreciation to Lasdun: ‘I gasped with ...”

“... to what other writers were doing about the war. In 1943, after reading a story about the army by John Cheever in the New Yorker, he wrote to Mackie: ‘The trouble with writing a story about the army is this: people expect something to happen in a story (Cheever supplied things, lots of things); but the whole point of the army is that nothing ever does ...”

“... Most of the heavy industry and infrastructure were publicly owned. British power stations and steel plants burned British coal. British-owned factories still made ships, cars and lorries, railway locomotives and textiles. We smoked British brands of cigarettes, drank our own Watneys, ate our own sweets. Not all of these products were flawless and often ...”