“... in the Parc de la Ciutadella; 16 years later he used a steel frame for his concert hall, El Palau de la Música Catalana, making it the first curtain-wall building in Spain and one of the first in the world. Both buildings sought to establish the progressive nature of the Catalan enterprise, but both are also laden with medieval ...”

“... In​ 1993 the soothsayer John Major advised that fifty years hence Britain ‘will still be the country of long shadows on county grounds, warm beer, invincible green suburbs, dog lovers and pools fillers’. Still? That suggests these properties were extant in 1993. And maybe they were, somewhere. The optimist premier equated country with county, with his native patch, Surrey, where the past is never dead but constantly honoured in reproductions of varying degrees of happy bogusness ...”

“... moment of his election to Parliament to the eventual achievement of his goal. One wonders whether John Major ever heard a similar message click-clacking from railway carriage wheels in the course of his extraordinary non-stop journey up the same greasy pole. There was scarcely time for him to form expectations during the interval that ran from his original ...”

“... one. Tears were, on the whole, rather approved of in our house. My father liked to say: ‘I have no time for a man who cannot weep’ (he may have been quoting Churchill). At bedtime, tears would gather in his blue-bloodshot eyes as he read his favourite poems to us. John Dowland’s ‘Weep you ...”

“... to depart from revered authorities. Under his hands plans for a church steeple or an academic hall would turn into a bold revision of Vitruvian schemes, the twitches of an anatomised dog into a startling challenge to Galenic orthodoxy, the motion of a planetary model into liberation from the ‘tyranny’ of ancient astronomy. The puzzle, now, is to ...”

“... The major contribution of the English theatre to last year’s Brecht centenary was Lee Hall’s dazzling version of Mr Puntila and His Man Matti, presented by the Right Size, a touring company led by the comic actors Sean Foley and Hamish McColl. Their prologue goes some way to explaining why the Anglophone response to the Brechtfest was so muted ...”

“... had coaxed him into believing that dancing was something that could be learnt. ‘There are no steps, believe me,’ he said. ‘You just have to move, and enjoy yourself.’ And this matter, of moving, and being able to enjoy it, had taken on some importance because the first Senior School Social of the year had been announced, and the date set for ...”

“... preferably home grown. British true crime tends to be about British killers – Ian Brady (See No Evil), John Christie (Rillington Place), the Wests (Fred and Rose), Dennis Nilsen (Des), Jeremy Bamber (White House Farm), Harold Shipman (Doctor Death) – while American true crime favours American atrocities. I don’t ...”

“... now, when they are so far behind in the opinion polls, they propose to recover by transforming John Major into a Europhobic John Bull. The other key to Conservative success was organisation. As Parliamentary reform acts expanded the electorate, the Conservatives recruited a mass membership in the constituencies. These ...”

“... detest what you say, but I will defend to the death your right to say it.’ Actually, as John Durham Peters points out in Courting the Abyss, there is no evidence that Voltaire ever said any such thing. An English writer, Beatrice Hall, writing under a male pseudonym in ...”

“... he was lucky to miss), he was taken into the royal council of King Philip VI. With the next king, John II, who ascended the French throne in 1350, he came to be on very close terms. He was one of the Knights of the Order of the Star, founded by John in 1352 and which that king hoped would revive French chivalry after its ...”

“... typewriters. When he died, Wilson was learning Hungarian, part of a new investigative project. John Wain tells how he went to see him and asked him casually what had happened to the Indians round his up-state New York home. Wilson was ashamed that he could not answer the question, investigated it, and produced his book Apologies to the Iroquois. For ...”

“... inheritance, which survives as a glorious muddle of a house, centred on an enchanting Medieval hall and sprawling out into its Renaissance and later additions. Jonson’s poem makes virtues of the family’s necessities. Though the Sidneys thought of their ancestors as grand Medieval landlords, a conceit reinforced by a fake family tree concocted for ...”

“... to practise my newly acquired skill. My parents were both readers and Dad took the periodical John Bull, the books they generally favoured literature of escape, tales of ordinary folk like themselves who had thrown it all up for a life of mild adventure, a smallholding on the Wolds, say, or an island sanctuary, with both of them fans of the naturalist ...”

“... that her ‘researches have turned up more than one hundred women novelists before Jane Austen and no more than thirty men’. Then follows a remarkable passage: ‘Among the neglected men I have found Robert Bage, Henry Brooke, John Bunyan, Geoffrey Chaucer, Thomas Delaney [sic], Emanuel Ford, William Godwin, Richard ...”