“... I fear’s that great worked-out black hollow under mine. Not train departure time, and not Town Hall with the great white clock face I can see, coal, that began, with no man here at all, as 300 million-year-old plant debris. 5 kids still play at making blossoms fall and humming as they do Here Comes the Bride. They never seem to tire of their ball though I ...”

“... urban for its outer-suburban context’. Hatherley is even more ensorcelled by Alison and Peter Smithson’s béton brut behemoth, Robin Hood Gardens in East London (shown above). For him the Smithsons are the real heroes, and a half-century on he reprises Reyner Banham – with dialectical knobs on – by placing them and their fellow New Brutalists ...”

“... if technically difficult way to decorate a Gothic building, was obtained from the German painter Peter von Cornelius. Hugely popular exhibitions of potential schemes were held in Westminster Hall and much discussed, for the public expected a lot for their money. The scheme was supposed to encourage artists, educate ...”

“... of jurisprudence, barrister, journalist, colonial civil servant and eventually master of Trinity Hall, Cambridge. Maine made an eloquent case for the historicity and agency of the colonised, as part of an attempt to reconstitute the colonial project on a more durable basis. In doing so, he distinguished the West from the non-West, universal civilisation from ...”

“... Exploration (GFOE) have focused on an area between fifteen and twenty miles off Flamborough Head. Peter Reaveley, one of the GFOE researchers, sent me thirteen handwritten pages about his analysis. ‘I derived the weather – visibility, winds, the sunrise and sunset, moon-rise and moon-set, and the magnetic variation,’ he wrote. ‘I built scale models ...”

“... Calton, an area known for the Barras flea market and the Barrowland Ballroom, once a famous dance hall and now a popular music venue. I had been told that in its first four months, the Thistle oversaw 2010 injections and prevented thirty overdoses. ‘Do you know how many times you’ve used here, Ryan?’ Arthur Jarvis, a social worker, asked. ‘Two hundred ...”

“... Thelma ended, Barnes flitted between New York, Paris and London, with spells in Devon at Hayford Hall, a house rented by Peggy Guggenheim for her lost and drunken friends. Barnes reworked many drafts of Nightwood here, with the support and editorial expertise of her friend Emily Coleman, who made sure T.S. Eliot read the manuscript. Though Eliot admired and ...”

“... Cross, visible only to people who know where to look for it. The ceiling in the school dining hall is a constantly changing lifelike simulation of the sky, and the portraits are alive: they visit one another and talk to the people outside the frames. Though Games loom large, the game of Quidditch is played in the air on flying broomsticks. (For most ...”

“... them as a powerful second reality. They read the story, or listen to the dead talk in a public hall; two hours pass; they close the book or rise from their seat, they shut down that other world, run out into the high street and go looking for a pizza. In Britain, where mainstream religion is dwindling into a mix of apathy and superstition, alternative ...”

“... in vividly translucent colours. Visiting Louis XIII’s château at St-Germain-en-Laye in 1625, Peter Heylyn, one of Bacon’s contemporaries, admitted that he would have been more impressed by the decorative stained glass had he not previously seen Bacon’s installation at Gorhambury, where ‘all the Fables of Ovid’s Metamorphoses are so naturally and ...”

“... For Wearing, contemporary drama (the ‘journalism of the imagination’) was the loser. Even Peter Flannery’s triumphant mid-1990s nine-parter Our Friends in the North was shown despite rather than because of the prevailing BBC ethos. Michael Jackson, then head of BBC2, described the serial as ‘without doubt the contemporary drama event of the ...”

“... it is, I don’t see it forming one of the Saturday night film shows they have in our village hall.19 March, Yorkshire. A gorgeous morning, the snow all but gone and though it’s windy still almost warm. Between Rupert getting up and him fetching me a cup of tea I reread ‘Elizabeth at Rycote’, an essay in A.L. Rowse’s The English Spirit, published ...”

“... my finger on it.When I packed my bags for London, at 18 years old, I went to live in a women’s hall of residence in Bloomsbury. It was a haven of warmth, calm and order. My course was engrossing, and it was taught by lawyers and academics of stature and reputation. I got involved in student politics: meetings that dragged on towards midnight. It was what I ...”

“... a bang, but the rest knew nothing until, about twenty minutes later, Mr Kebede appeared in the hall in his stockinged feet, saying there was a fire in his flat. He thought it had started at the back of his fridge. He called the police before going to the door of his next-door neighbour, Maryam Adam, who was three months pregnant. ‘It was exactly 12.50 ...”

“... on which Inglis’s gods and heroes disport themselves. Thus at the memorial meeting in Conway Hall there is Nick Garnham, ‘elegant, intelligent, disdainful Wykehamist’. Earlier, at the Garden House Hotel riot – a Cambridge protest against the rule of the Greek colonels – there is Bob Rowthorn, ‘then as now the best-looking economist in a not ...”