“... of the ‘cathedral window’ above the entrance; others talk about the ‘clerestory’. The 325-foot chimney tower – or ‘campanile’, as Stamp calls it – also has an ecclesiastical aspect, particularly since it is situated directly opposite the slightly higher dome of St Paul’s. And Scott himself is best known as the architect of the Anglican ...”

“... of One for My Baby is called Alfie (Parsons seems to be paying homage to characters played by Michael Caine). Alfie’s wife is called Rose. Rose dies on him. She was working in Hong Kong. In Man and Boy Harry’s misfortune led him to reassess his relationship with his young son and his parents and to fall in love with a woman who had a young daughter of ...”

“... thundering at the Bar of the House of Commons, he struck everyone as enormous: physically so, six foot two, broad-browed, broad-shouldered (in later years elephantine and ponderous of gait) and gifted with a resonant voice which could reach audiences in their thousands without any visible effort; but also eloquent, serious, immensely moral and decent. He was ...”

“... of Bob Hope, from the folk figure of Kiepenkerl (a travelling pedlar in medieval Germany) to Michael Jackson and his pet chimp Bubbles, showed a canny sense of the capaciousness of kitsch. But the social unease produced by a conscious display of bad taste wasn’t at all the point for Koons, who, in Warholian fashion, insisted on the sincerity of his ...”

“... inflicting great damage on the economy. Yet politically, the Major government was bound hand and foot to its existing policy – and Labour’s only criticism was that the policy did not go far enough. That was the position at the time of the general election in April 1992, at which Major squeaked home for another term. When Black Wednesday came in ...”

“... sentence for armed robbery, which makes him sound dangerous and exciting. Far from it. He’s five foot nothing, wears thick spectacles, speaks slowly with a broad Dublin accent and is polite to strangers. He was 56 at the time of the robbery. He was gambling in the Chinese Club in Fortitude Valley, Brisbane, and he’d run out of money. It was 3 a.m. A few ...”

“... is dominated by the stupendous last-minute addition to Nijs’s acquisitions – the nine nine-foot-wide canvases that make up Mantegna’s Triumphs of Caesar and which are normally housed at Hampton Court Palace. Leaving Mantua, the curators argue, saved them from the Landsknechts who ransacked the Gonzaga palace in an episode of the Thirty ...”

“... organise elaborate, extra-season fashion shows in exciting locations. While publications typically foot the bill for their editors to make the New York, London, Paris, Milan circuit, the bills for these shows are handled by the brands themselves. Influencers (and some editors) are treated to fancy hotel rooms full of designer goods, lavish meals and parties ...”

“... up the slopes towards the French positions. In his classic account of the war, the historian Michael Howard described what happened next:The field officers on their horses were the first casualties. The men on foot struggled forward against the chassepot fire as if into a hailstorm, shoulders hunched, heads ...”

“... and influential writers and preachers of his age to a dull and worthy figure. Both Greaves and Michael Davies appear to accept, and even collude with, Bunyan’s diminished presence in contemporary British culture. Bunyan, however, remains an enduring presence in Ulster Protestantism. In a lecture given many years ago, ‘The Triumph of the Word of God in ...”

“... poets [i.e. classical writers], because they said that a line consisted of feet, but we say that a foot consists of lines.’ The hendecasyllable line has a heavy stress on the tenth syllable, and it has a caesura, but beyond that it is a very fluid and flexible affair. Often one’s ear detects three main stresses (‘Nel mézzo del cammín di nostra ...”

“... come out in English until 2012, but it still isn’t very reader-friendly: it has no introduction (Michael Smith adds a brief translator’s note), sketchy endnotes and no index. It’s basically Lefort’s doctoral thesis, though he was pushing fifty by the time it saw the light of day in French. His thesis supervisor, Raymond Aron, described its style as ...”

“... the crash, of Dodi having received phone-calls over dinner, calls warning him that something was a foot. One call had made him ‘extremely tense’. Soon afterwards, he ‘decided to leave the hotel’. This story, reported in al-Ahram, seems to have originated in a French magazine called Nouveau Détective. On one of the two evenings I spent in Cairo, I went ...”

“... was a very, very dangerous job,’ Albertina says. ‘We used to put a plank down, 70 foot high, then run across [that] plank carrying another plank. No harnesses, we’d just run across. You had to have bottle. A lot of the Scotland Road lads went over and did the job. And there were a lot of Birkenhead lads, who’d come from similar areas. Some ...”

“... of Skopelos to the chariots often depicted on pots. But until the 1952 decipherment of Linear B by Michael Ventris and John Chadwick, the ruling orthodoxy was that a hypothesised ‘Minoan’ was the (un-Greek) language of the palace culture of Crete and the Mycenaean settlements, so that the origins of the Iliad must come after that, not earlier than the ...”