“... talents hampering himself with an over-studious respect for the traditional forms. Brian Jones’s The Island Normal suffers from no such fault. Most of the poems in this book contrive to be both short and unshapely. Jones casts a disaffected eye over the bleaker aspects of our national landscape – dreary ...”

“... that he was also a writer. English painters have written more than most. Some, like Blake, David Jones, Mervyn Peake and Michael Ayrton (who did a portrait of Lewis and dust jackets for his late novels), have created literary and visual worlds that overlap. Lewis, despite being a novelist, was more like Sickert or Hogarth, who used words to fight critical ...”

“... possible future careers for them, not intended to mirror reality. For instance, his fictional ‘Peter Morrison’, the decent Conservative MP, has nothing to do with the real-life Peter Morrison MP but was inspired by boyhood memories of the real-life James Prior. The fictional ‘...”

“... after the end of the Second World War and three before the end of rationing. By this time Barbara Jones was 39, an established artist and designer. The titles of the books and magazine articles that made her name as an illustrator tell their own story: a translation of Boulestin’s Ease and Endurance; Bombed Churches as War Memorials; and a piece for Vogue ...”

“... but claiming a tenuous connection with the Pilgrim Fathers through a memorial to Christopher Jones, captain of the Mayflower – is close by, surrounded by trees and a tiny, green churchyard. It was all very quiet, rather slow and ...”

“... between building as structure and building as message, has become as vague as it was when Inigo Jones created masques as well as banqueting houses and palaces, all of them as projections of the king’s ...”

“... in bed, dying of flu, William Empson burst into my room, very sprightly, saying: ‘Now come along Jones, you must get up and come to Stonehenge.’ I croaked an apology and claimed an imminent, prior appointment with the Lord God Almighty. ‘Oh dear. I am sorry,’ he said. ‘But you would do much better to come to Stonehenge.’This was Empson at ...”

“... first projection, preserved in a famous MS of about 1300, and reproduced as one of Berggren and Jones’s splendid full-colour plates. The basic outline of the Mediterranean is now recognisable; so is the Arabian peninsula. Eastward we see a foreshortened India, and a hugely exaggerated Taprobane (Sri Lanka). The further from Alexandria, the greater the ...”

“... in opposition’. This sad shake of the head segues effortlessly into mention of poor persecuted Peter Mandelson, who has suffered so terribly at the hands of a remorseless and unforgiving press. ‘The standards of manners and courtesy have dropped,’ Mandelson told Lloyd (‘in his rooms in the Commons’), ‘there’s a lack of any kind of respect for ...”

“... its rules. Most of them are now in the RIBA library: they were brought to England by Inigo Jones in the early 1600s and then passed through various hands, in particular Lord Burlington’s. Nearly all are plans and elevations, so to read them you must extract three-dimensional reality from two-dimensional projections. You can test your interpretive ...”

“... Cow-shed and Houses on the Palatine Hill is composed as stolidly as a picture postcard; Thomas Jones’s A Wall in Naples is as uncompromisingly frontal as a surveyor’s photograph for an insurance claim: all you see is a wall, a door, a window, the top of what looks like a fig tree, some washing hung out to dry, and the sky. Yet these are pictures you ...”

“... you that London might now have the regal expansiveness of Paris if the Whitehall Palace that Inigo Jones and John Webb drew up for Charles I had been built. Then our prime minister might be living not in the modest decency of Downing Street but in something more like the Hôtel Matignon. Passing it and other grand houses given over to government use in the rue ...”

“... Peter Prince’s admirable novel, The Good Father, is about a group of professional-class people in the London Borough of Lambeth, trying to see themselves as liberal and left-wing. They were students together in the late 1960s and are struggling to maintain in the 1980s the package of liberal values (or ‘received ideas’) which they shared so confidently in their youth ...”

“... for his stewardship of the Party. ‘I am deeply ashamed,’ he began. Unfortunately for Mervyn Jones, who both loves and admires his subject and would have us dwell on other things, it is the freeze-frame of that moment which lives on. For Foot had led Labour to its worst defeat since 1922, a defeat so bad that it handicaps Labour still. In almost exactly ...”

“... her will, and her life became very bitter to her.’ In his sympathetic study of Pattison, H.S. Jones argues that the ‘wall of ice’ which eventually divided the Pattisons did not form until the breakdown of sexual relations in 1875-76, documented in agonising detail in the couple’s correspondence. But it is all too clear from Francis’s own writings ...”