“... West minster to St Paul’s East minster. The settlement which, under Edward the Confessor and his Norman successors, would become the nation’s capital, was thus sandwiched between two great churches, dedicated to the patron saints of the most symbolic of all ancient cities, Rome. This connection with Rome and Peter was fundamental to Westminster. Legend had ...”

“... defined include Bernard Lewis, Stanford Shaw, David Fromkin, Justin McCarthy, Guenther Lewy, Norman Stone, Michael Gunter, Andrew Mango, Roderic Davison, Edward Erickson and Steven Katz, and although all of them have had dealings with Turkish academic institutions, none is likely to have bent his opinion to suit material interests. They are joined ...”

“... and young characters made it seem a product of a hypothetical GLC film unit. Small wonder that Norman Stone bemoaned ‘the overall feeling of disgust and decay’ conveyed by the film and complained that Kureishi was inciting a ‘sleazy, sick hedonism’. Audiences disagreed. Costing £600,000 to make, the film grossed $15,000,000 and earned the ...”

“... replacements and extensions followed. Then, mainly in the 1920s, the street was rebuilt in stone. Complaints about the new Regent Street have rumbled on ever since. The first substantial breach – it set the Imperial Edwardian tone of much that was to follow – was made by the back elevation of Norman Shaw’s ...”

“... radical cultural transformation. It meant, for example, the coming of the book and of building in stone. As Patrick Wormald suggests, these are changes the significance of which should be understood by an age which has itself seen the advent of the microchip and pre-stressed concrete. In government, in art and in literature the Anglo-Saxons showed ...”

“... Has any other contemporary designer ‘signed’ as many cityscapes as Norman Foster? Perhaps no architect since Christopher Wren has affected the London skyline so dramatically, from the Swiss Re ‘gherkin’ to the new Wembley Stadium arch. Foster has a right to be immodest, and the Catalogue of his work is punctuated with adjectives like ‘first’ and ‘largest’, and verbs like ‘reinvent’ and ‘redefine ...”

“... Bon Marché, which, at the time, had a staff of 12. Seventeen years later, he laid the foundation stone of a vast new department store that was to employ 1,788 men and women (mostly men) by 1877, and 4,500 by 1906. Within Boucicaut’s lifetime – he died in 1877 – what had begun as a shop had become a major commercial enterprise. When his wife died ten ...”

“... and specials, became the reporters’ reporter, the producers’ producer, and he later brought in Norman Mailer to write the book. He showed himself to be the king deal-maker and media broker, the chief documenter, of grand-scale American tragedy. Wherever there has been sensational news in America over the last thirty years, there you will invariably find ...”

“... Hardy trademark) is back to the 17th century in two more hops: ‘In my time the floors were of stone, sanded, & the front of squared ashlar, just as in Dr Burney’s day, &, no doubt, Sir Isaac Newton’s.’ Most memorably recreated is the 70-year-old scene of Martha Brown’s execution, witnessed by Hardy as a boy of 16 and still a scrupulously ...”

“... whenever possible, actual books and ideas, that help explain the mysterious novels and stories. Norman Sherry famously does this in Conrad’s Eastern World and Conrad’s Western World, remarkable works of sleuthing rediscovery that respectively cover Conrad’s Indian and Pacific Ocean voyages, and his wanderings in Africa, Europe and Latin America. But ...”

“... the transformation of the Roman shrine to St Alban, the first British Christian martyr, into a Norman church of handsome proportions, eventually dedicated in 1115. A succession of ambitious and not always scrupulous abbots and master masons enlarged and extended the abbey church over the following centuries. Eventually the infeasible building outgrew its ...”

“... Christopher Hitchens may not be ‘the nearest thing to a one-man band since I.F. Stone laid down his pen’, but he comes close. For the Sake of Argument records a life of action, of being in the right place at the right time. Thomas Mann could never find the revolution: Hitchens cannot help tripping over it. This is, no doubt, the privilege of the foreign correspondent, but some are clearly more privileged than others ...”

“... Hungarian émigrés returned from the United States for Christmas, but I doubt it. I put on half a stone while I was in Hungary, all from eating too much. Now I am having difficulty taking the half-stone off again. The Hungarians have one outstanding grievance: the Hungarian minority in Rumania is treated abominably. No love ...”

“... The most successful pieces in Norman MacCaig’s Collected Poems tend to be lists of one kind or another. He is best, too, when he has found something to celebrate. A poem such as ‘Praise of a Collie’, which enumerates the virtues of an admired sheep-dog, now dead, works well enough as a primitive catalogue. The fourth of its five three-line stanzas gives something of its flavour: She sailed in the dinghy like a proper sea-dog ...”

“... the ‘shower scene’ proper, from Marion’s feet stepping into the bathtub to the moment when Norman is heard shouting ‘Mother! Oh God! Mother! Blood! Blood!’ back at the house, which Skerry extends to 60 shots by starting the scene from the moment the hapless Marion sits in Cabin 1 figuring what she owes, having determined to redeem herself by ...”