“... the English period too. But it all hinges on Linson’s daybed. The daybed was along a windowless wall covered with drawings, prints, oil sketches and a wooden artist’s palette. The room was full of late Victorian clutter: an end table holding a large kerosene lamp, on the floor a tall square ceramic vase stuffed tight with a cluster of brushes, a stout ...”

“... The US scarcely paid attention, but continued to support Pakistan. With the fall of the Berlin Wall in 1989 and the implosion of the USSR in 1991, the US lost virtually all interest in Afghanistan. Hekmatyar was never as good as the CIA thought he was, and with the creation in 1994 of the Taliban, both Pakistan and Saudi Arabia transferred their secret ...”

“... their character and dynamism, not the LEAs. All sponsors have a corporate view of schools, even if Richard Tice, chair of governors in one of the first academies, Northampton Academy, is unusual in the frankness with which he espouses the corporate model: the school as a business and the head as a CEO. All put tremendous emphasis on leadership and the ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... Hailsham mentioned that he had once been bitten by the future Duke of Montrose while playing the Wall Game at Eton. Here was the future of both Rhodesias at stake, and here was our national level of allusion. Wasn’t it that sort of thing that brought modernising, technological Labourism to power in 1964? Years later, towards the end of the Seventies, an ...”

“... and Verso books, Davis lived from 1973 to 1987 in Glasgow, Belfast and London.) The attempt to wall Davis off in this way from some ‘real’ LA to which he does not belong is self-discrediting, as is the associated fantasy that insecure Angelenos have embraced Ecology of Fear to smear their city and curry favour with the New York establishment. It is ...”

“... Wildly excited at the thought that the Boers might at last have created the vital crack in the wall of the British Empire, Nicholas rushed off to see the Kaiser – ‘I intend to set the Emperor on the British, reminding him of his famous telegram to Kruger!’ – while the Russian Foreign Minister tried to interest the French in an anti-British ...”

“... architects to think there was anything for them in new Tube stations besides the ‘fit-out’. As Richard MacCormac, whose firm has designed the new Southwark Station, put it: ‘the engineers design the system, then the architects dress it up. Was it just a matter of deciding which tiles to put on the platform walls?’ When Paoletti started looking for ...”

“... canvases visible, he used to keep one of his earliest abstractions, Number 22, 1949, against a wall in a narrow storage area. This early essay into a kind of limitless space, with huge areas of floating yellow and orange, interrupted only by a red band straddling the canvas from side to side, shocked unaccustomed eyes. Rothko had not quite reached the ...”

“... Trevor-Roper), art and popular taste (Quentin Bell), the evolution of the English landscape (Richard Muir) – are excellent and briskly-written popularising surveys. But the whole enterprise, I do think, is compromised by those gestures towards ‘the English Spirit’, ‘the making of a tradition’ etc. (They come thickest, it is true, in the ...”

“... or architecture must study the accidents of survival. Pitifully little remains to us. Not a single wall of the grand Fatimid mausolea still stands. Of the vast list of treasures recorded in the inventory of the Fatimid palace in 11th-century Egypt, not one object has survived to be identified. Indeed, whole categories of artefact described in that inventory ...”

“... Smedley, she joined the American Communist Party. She returned to Germany just in time for the Wall Street Crash and, refusing financial help from her family, married Hamburger and set up house in a pokey flat. He qualified as an architect but couldn’t find work, while she ran the Marxist Workers’ Lending Library from a disused pigeon cellar. Then ...”

“... refused access.Biographies convince us by being authoritative rather than objective. The musician Richard Witts, whose biography of Nico was published in 1993, was asked by her to write her life. She wanted him to make it like a novel and he did, dramatising postwar Berlin, Paris in the 1950s, New York and London in the 1960s and 1970s, Manchester in the ...”

“... he had. ‘Count on the memory of history,’ he told the unfortunate English negotiator William Richard Hamilton, ‘you too will have burned a library in Alexandria.’ In the end, the savants left with 55 cases of specimens and scientific papers. But the British got most of the artefacts, including the Rosetta Stone, all of which were taken back to London ...”

“... all you had to do was state your fantastical intentions – Leeks (Blue Solaise), Leeks (King Richard), Nasturtium (Moonlight), Nasturtium (Whirlybird), Nasturtium (Canary Creeper) – and nature would take care of the rest. Guy’s income came mostly from the restaurant trade and the Union Square farmers’ market in New York. His specialities were dried ...”