“... up. He sees the London smoke is only a footstool. Above, the rain as it leaves mounts in a curving wall, immense, slate grey, slate purple. An anvil, pulling back. At the very top, it cauliflowers. It goes to bumps and lumps and smoothed-out tiny battlements too complicated for your eyes, but all crisp and clear.Even in his first appearance, on the day of the ...”

“... It is perhaps significant that when her daughter showed the manuscript of these memoirs to Richard Buckle, who was preparing the Penguin edition of his life of Nijinsky, he did not think it necessary to change his own evaluation. But he was fascinated by Nijinska’s memories of her brother’s hitherto unrecorded early childhood. One sees why: they ...”

“... rightness of the British cause and the US press duly fell in with it. The New York Times and the Wall Street Journal compared Mossadegh to Hitler, even though his occasionally authoritarian populism had to contend with a fractious parliament, and a growing internal opposition composed of merchants, landowners, royalists, the military and right-wing clerics ...”

“... illumination in the whole set is the faded sign for SUNLIGHT SOAP still surviving on an old brick wall. A little dizzy now, and peckish, I opted for a coffee break in the Dock Café, where I hoped to pick up on local responses to the national day of mourning. This bright, clean facility was certainly an improvement on what had been here before. The starred ...”

“... so on.For the most part art-historical terms – Fauvism, Cubism and the rest – are avoided in wall texts in favour of general rubrics like ‘Abstraction and Utopia’ and ‘Design for Modern Life’, and inclusive settings like ‘Paris in the 1920s’ and ‘In and around Harlem’. Sometimes the galleries are punctuated by New York moments: an early ...”

“... of provincial artisan stock. He was born in Exeter around 1547, the eldest of eight children of Richard Hilliard, a goldsmith, and Laurence Wall, the daughter of Richard’s former master (her name recurs in later generations of the family in the more sophisticated form of ...”

“... the entire Paternoster. Descartes had a special fondness for clockwork, and possessed a fine wall-clock of his own. He greatly admired the ornate clock at Strasbourg with its automatic crowing cockerel, and when he explored the hypothesis that ‘the body is nothing but a statue or an earthenware machine’ in his early manuscript On Man, his main ...”

“... as a ‘Toxic Super-Ego’, a concept he has learned from the charismatic YouTube psychologist Richard Grannon. But Charles reckons there’s something about Grannon himself that ‘doesn’t entirely add up’. If he’s really a lost soul like Charles, how can he also be ‘a life-coach/therapist and teach high-level martial arts and do a series of other ...”

“... an antique fair. That’s just how we are I’m afraid.’ This is an arch piece of marketing from Richard Osman, promoting his detective novels to an American readership. There’s no reason to suppose that British people are better at hiding in plain sight than anyone else. However, they do like a murder story, and a thriving industry has grown up around ...”

“... glow. These are not the uncorseted, feelgood ramblings of Sixties survivors (Howard Marks, Richard Neville et al), but the in-your-face, out-of-your-skull, trust-nobody, swallow-anything limbo that acted, it has become clear, as a curtain-raiser to the free-market excesses that were to follow. Punk auditioned the dark night of Keith Joseph and Norman ...”

“... ways in which the different frontiers were developed, the vicissitudes and purpose of Hadrian’s wall (not a defensive barrier in the Medieval sense, nor even the actual boundary of Roman Britain, but a form of frontier control). With 872 pages, 33 contributors, nine bibliographies, 167 illustrations and 195 figures, mostly maps and charts, this handsome ...”

“... and falls – splat! – to his backside on the bathroom floor. Charlie is weeping, banging on the wall with his fist. The policeman is standing, slipping, falling – splat! splat! – over and over again. Charlie turns and stumbles despairingly out of the bathroom, face buried in his sleeve. The falling rhythms catch nicely the comedy of the falling to the ...”

“... in the Fifties; and the problem which confronts us anew with the demolition of the Berlin Wall – a problem which cannot be assessed (as here) simply as part of the balance-sheet of Mrs Thatcher’s ‘achievements’. Some might describe the ignorance of this dimension in a history of Britain avowedly written ‘for our day’ as culpable: it ...”

“... so archaic, so self-confounding, so remote from the basic American consensus, ever got so far?’ Richard Hofstadter asked. Graffiti artists shared the intelligentsia’s disdain and defaced Goldwater’s campaign billboards, appending the word ‘Wing’ to his slogan ‘In Your Heart You Know He’s Right.’ Others added the coda: ‘In Your Guts You Know ...”

“... and I would say two or three groin shots, very harsh. A knee to the abdomen. Thrown against the wall and so forth.Some detainees were hosed down with cold water and then thrown into air-conditioned rooms. Some were waterboarded. One was forced to drink urine. According to military medics, others had burns on their bodies.In​ The Fort Bragg Cartel, Seth ...”