“... The central staircase​ at Camden Town Hall is made of white marble from Carrara and is more lustrous than any marble staircase you’re likely to see in Rome. The building was designed for the Borough of St Pancras by Albert Thomas, a disciple of Lutyens, and opened in 1937 as St Pancras Town Hall ...”

“... their Utopian endeavours, for reasons well summarised by Leonard Elmhirst, founder of Dartington Hall School: ‘they disregarded sound economics, they followed some ethical or theoretical principle too rigorously, or they attempted to isolate themselves too completely from the social and economic world around them.’ Above all, Utopians have usually been ...”

“... In​ 1989, Stuart Hall and Martin Jacques published an anthology of articles from Marxism Today, the magazine of the Communist Party of Great Britain, which Jacques edited. ‘The world has changed,’ they wrote in the introduction to New Times: The Changing Face of Politics in the 1990s. ‘Britain and other advanced capitalist societies’ were ‘increasingly characterised by diversity, differentiation and fragmentation, rather than homogeneity, standardisation and the economies and organisations of scale which characterised modern mass society ...”

“... whose victims, according to his biographer Julian Symons, often felt he ‘did not mean to do wrong’; a man fond of ‘the good life … of mistresses, champagne, gambling and entertaining’. He was best known for his magazine John Bull. Launched in 1906 following Bottomley’s election as the Liberal MP for Hackney South, it specialised in a leaden ...”

“... government’s own failure to bring down the numbers of new immigrants in line with the promises David Cameron had made. A range of new policies, including checks with hospitals, councils and letting agencies, were designed to hound people out of the country by making it impossible for them to get state benefits or employment. The scandal was that the Home ...”

“... to link its various trends and phases, would find themselves spontaneously reinventing Stuart Hall. Since he arrived in Britain from Jamaica in 1951, Hall has been the sort of radical they might have despatched from Central Casting. Charming, charismatic, formidably bright and probably the most electrifying public ...”

“... the novel that demonstrate what Hitchcock was really up to. The most notable of these is a music-hall performer called Mr Memory. In the film’s opening scene, he answers the questions fired at him by the music-hall audience with absolute infallibility, as long as they concern matters of fact. His performance has two ...”

“... he had since 1919 confined himself to an apartment building in downtown Boston named Garrison Hall. For as many as sixteen hours of a normal day he would stay in bed, when not sitting or reading in the bathroom. The rooms he frequented were kept shaded for the same reason his car was painted a dull black: to protect his eyes from glare. He suffered ...”

“... me ever since: a hand-typed table of integrals seemingly little different from the ones I’d kept by me as a student. The familiarity of the contents jarred with the table’s front page. Only 31 copies of the table had been printed, the recipients listed on the cover. The table, dated 24 June 1947, had been prepared to accompany a classified ...”

“... Towards the end of Radclyffe Hall’s The Unlit Lamp (1924), the heroine, Joan Ogden, who has grown miserably old in a small provincial town, overhears two young women discussing her. She recognises them as women of the same ‘type’ as her: unattached, independent, sexually ambiguous. They dress like her, and wear their hair cut in a similar style ...”

“... individualised? It was a war that fairly compels the commentator to take sides. Can the novelist do so without telling a one-sided story? Above all, could any outsider – Thomas Keneally is Australian – hope to capture the atmosphere, the emotions, the idiolects of the region and of the period? Confederates marvellously solves or circumvents all these ...”

“... has survived as a real national party. Politics may have become boring, but the politicians do not seem to have noticed. Many of the same faces are carrying on as before, intriguing with former rivals, plotting new coalitions, even changing parties if such a course might rescue them from political oblivion. I remember two election meetings in the 1982 ...”

“... with similar impatience to the list of phobias drawn up by the American psychologist Stanley Hall. Hall had managed to find 132. In Freud’s thinking about phobia there is a consistent emphasis on the scale and density of the precautions erected against danger. Phobia’s anticathexis, he observed, takes the shape of ...”

“... builders of Chernobyl? For the Kariba North Bank power station, however, there is now a memorial-David Morrell’s Indictment. Mr Morrell is the chairman of Mitchell Construction, the original contractors for the KNB project, and his book breaks ground unturned since Samuel Smiles’s Lives of the Engineers. In his pages, Mitchell Construction, in legal ...”

“... as late as 1990, Wolfe was complaining had been cold-shouldered by writers of serious fiction. A Hall of Mirrors, for instance, Stone’s first novel, published in 1967 when he was 30, was an epic attempt to cram all the major issues of the Sixties into a single narrative. ‘A Hall of Mirrors was something I shattered my ...”