“... boundless humdrum detail, is one of the great revolutionary conceptions in human history, which Charles Taylor in Sources of the Self claims as Christian in inspiration. The modern equivalent of Moll Flanders in this respect is EastEnders. Auerbach’s Mimesis, one of the great works of literary scholarship, was written between 1942 and 1945 in ...”

“... of Buckminster Fuller as well as by the more practical Californian modernism of Richard Neutra, Charles and Ray Eames, and other designers of the Case Study Houses in Los Angeles. However, by the late 1970s Piano, Rogers and Foster had diverged. Piano was never so Pop as Rogers nor so high-tech as Foster, and his signature device came to differ as ...”

“... broad-bottomed merchant vessel reconfigured by the navy as an armed freighter. It was named after Charles Wager, the first lord of the Admiralty and mastermind of the secret mission. In May 1741, having already lost dozens of its crew to disease, the Wager ran aground in the fearsome seas off the coast of Chile. Of the ship’s original complement of around ...”

“... use but liked enough to give him another project, The African Queen. Later Agee collaborated with Charles Laughton on the screenplay of Davis Grubb’s extraordinary novel about the discovery of evil in childhood, The Night of the Hunter. He died in 1955, of a heart attack, aged 45, leaving behind several manuscript chapters of an autobiographical novel, A ...”

“... mistaking the cutter for a North Vietnamese patrol boat, launched a withering attack. In a passage which captures the lunacy of the war and the terror America’s war machine visited on the Vietnamese every day for a decade, Page describes the crew’s desperate and futile attempt to identify their boat, bring the attack to a halt and save ...”

“... is still dissection. That first cut into the great muscles of the back is as epochal a rite of passage as any we know. No surface, no depth of the earth is proportionately so dense with the names of its eponymous explorers as the human body. Over four centuries its every structure – large and small – was the object of exposure, probing, knowing and ...”

“... proved that this was not the case. This may turn out to be Philip Roth’s least favourite passage in the book (if and when he reads it), with its proof that Pierpont, however much she admires the humour he sets down on his pages, can’t notate it herself. Nothing more certainly sours a marriage, above all a marriage of minds, than treading on a ...”

“... for cynics is how many non-lawyers were at the conference which adopted this text, the first passage is of real importance in a world in which many interests, from governments to gangsters, want to and sometimes do influence and intimidate judges. A developed society in which there is no assured recourse to trustworthy courts of law is not civilised. But ...”

“... launches into some flight of rhetoric drawn direct from English Parliamentary culture, that this passage doesn’t ring true or must have caused its author concealed distress. We may admit the tensions, and accept O’Brien’s explanation of them: but an ambivalence has two sides, the devil has two horns, and what Burke both loved and hated requires as ...”

“... of ships sunk’. Reporters​ soon understood they had to be cheerful. Dimbleby’s BBC colleague Charles Gardner was attached to the RAF in France when British forces were falling back to the Channel in the late spring of 1940. His diary records that an officer told the press corps they should ‘go around with bright smiling faces’. Gardner added ...”

“... life and ‘heavy fetters’ of death in her elegies are reminiscent of the horrors of the Middle Passage. She often writes about the pain of separation, particularly of children from their parents. In a poem on the appointment of William Legge, earl of Dartmouth, as secretary of state with responsibility for the American colonies, she recounts her ...”

“... was a commendably French undertaking of course: he hints as much earlier in his letter, praising a passage in Saint-Robert’s book about the capacity to see ‘beyond the nation, but … primarily through the nation’ (as in seeing through a lens). Debray took this to express an ‘authentic internationalism whose formula is sought in every corner of the ...”

“... Goldfinger or the LCC’s Architects’ Department, but also that of Lutyens, Giles Gilbert Scott, Charles Holden and lesser lights such as Edwin Cooper or W. Curtis Green. Practically every Georgian terrace they can find features in the book. They disapprove of the City’s ‘untidy and expanding cluster’ of skyscrapers, and are more pleased with the ...”

“... market. Barkskins can fairly claim to be a family saga: René Sel is introduced on the first page, Charles Duquet (later Duke) on the second – both of them arriving in New France (later Canada) to work as indentured labourers before settling on the land they earn by their work – and members of both families are still present in the book seven hundred pages ...”

“... punched, kicked and dragged by the hair by officers whose ostensible purpose was to clear a passage for the Home Secretary. In the course of the disturbance, 38 students were arrested: most of them before Brittan’s arrival, but some after his departure – after the Home Secretary had delivered his speech on ‘Law and Order’. We need to focus on ...”