“... gushed from the architectural presses, pouring praise on Lutyens and his works. Written primarily by a younger generation of architects and architectural historians, they emphatically reinstate the interpretation eloquently enshrined in the great Lutyens Memorial published in 1950, where Christopher Hussey, in his 600-page biography, and A. S. G. Butler, in ...”

“... to admit anything impalpable could push philosophers to such an extreme, but the refusal would be understandable if it were the sole way of rescuing the mind from the lofty isolation of Cartesianism. There must be some other way, and Brian O’Shaughnessy’s book is the record of a search for one. As its title ...”

“... literature explaining his vagarious development, and the best study so far is a joint effort by two Berkeley scholars, Hubert Dreyfus, a philosopher, and Paul Rabinow, an anthropologist. Foucault himself lends credence to the Dreyfus/Rabinow interpretation by allowing them to include some of his recent unpublished ...”

“... ill-advised visit to Nazi Germany, ‘is either to fade out of the public eye or be a nuisance.’ It has generally been assumed that the Duke came in the second of these categories and, since it is even easier to hit a man when he is dead than when he is down, tilting at Windsor has recently become a popular sport. Some of the jousting has ...”

“... to say anything entirely erroneous. Whatever is written about a town so vast and varied, whether by city residents, provincial visitors or foreign observers, is likely to be at least and at best partially valid, which may explain why the literature on London is so lush. By the late 18th ...”

“... like all such devices, ought to maintain constancy. But it is also part of nature and so it may be affected by the kind of inconstancy that it often claims to detect in the other part which it measures. Wittgenstein in some of his later work was concerned with a fundamental form of this problem. Do the meanings of our ...”

“... leanings unblinkingly remarked that modern music, like socialism, democracy and the BBC, might be among the luxuries which the European middle classes would soon have to live without. Six or seven years ago, only Alfred Jarry’s immortal King Ubu could have entertained the idea of the Polish State Symphony Orchestra touring 13 English towns and cities ...”

“... away. His childhood and schooldays had been lonely and unhappy, and they were made harder to bear by his distant mother, his disappointed father, and his more robust and much-preferred sister. He had married a woman renowned for her beauty rather than her brains, largely because he had been told it was his duty to do so. ...”

“... and hammer through fine-grained sandstone until he struck ‘a fine, hearty gush of water’. By then he had dinted his way through eighty feet of rock, working alone from dawn till dark. When he was overcome with choke-damp at the start of work one day, he was hauled up unconscious – and resumed after a day or two once water had been thrown down the ...”

“... Modernism must be reckoned one of the lengthiest and most strenuous campaigns ever undertaken in the name of literature. Acutely conscious at once of the burden of the past – the intimidating totality of what had already been written – and of the present’s lightness, its free and easy way with burdens, its failure to be intimidated, the Modernist did not propose to carry on as before ...”

“... history in a nutshell.’ And indeed it is. But whose history? Exemplary as this Irish martyr may be, the priest is unable to identify him because he does not feature in the standard martyrology of Irish nationalism. He is, of course, Oscar Wilde. By the time this satirical scene occurs, two-thirds of the way through At ...”

“... a fluid mechanics whereby the ‘continual heat in our hearts’ is distributed through the body by the pineal gland (the de facto location of the soul), no longer looks so modern. But the declared redundancy of the classics would continue to mark much of the scientific project throughout the long modernity which may or may not have now come to an ...”

“... a sturdy quartet of well-carpentered plays that caught the spirit of mid-century America, followed by a long, increasingly unfocused, foggy tail. Rejected in his own country, the one-time toast of Broadway has finally to rely for validation on the subsidised theatre in England. Although he doesn’t entirely agree with this model, Martin Gottfried is a New ...”

“... pound. His sense of social detail is acute, as he reports Alec Douglas-Home’s doomed attempts to be trendy (he announced in a 1964 election speech that his party ‘is delivering the goods and it goes places and it will never, I promise you, get stuck in the mud’) and reveals that Edward Heath was probably the first leader of his party to have fitted ...”

“... Football League in 1977 as part of the old Fourth Division – this was when teams had to wait to be asked into the league rather than being promoted automatically – I started to count myself a fan, and to make the long journey to the end of the District Line to watch them play against sides like Rochdale and Darlington. After only two seasons in the Fourth ...”