“... The sources of inspiration begin in 1920s Berlin and end in the Costa del Sol. The passage is a small masterpiece of architectural criticism, exact in its judgments and surprising in its choices. Berthold Lubetkin’s Highpoint flats (1935-38) They aren’t always so subtle, or so dispassionate. In one of the few judgments cut from later ...”

“... and theoretician of constitutional monarchy, but his liberalism is not so easily categorised, as Stephen Holmes noted in his fine Benjamin Constant and the Making of Modern Liberalism. It was, not simply a vision of the laissez-faire state guaranteeing the French bourgeoisie the right to get rich – as François Guizot was famously to propose during the ...”

“... ghosts through, the instigators of riot.Single button strategically undone at the throat of the small-check Ben Shermans, slippery bomber jacket zipped to the V, No 1 crop eliding to suedehead: the performance of a performance. Stewart Home rampaging from the cover of No Pity. The tasty venue? ‘Upstairs at the Garage’, an evening of sponsored ...”

“... of them to alter their middle-class character. It was the policy of the cuckoo in the nest. A small number of middle-class boys had first been allowed to share in the endowments made for the poor early in the 19th century. By the 1870s there was a powerful ‘reform’ movement pressing for the new type of school. Some of the hospitals, notably ...”

“... mother Bertha was a cultivated woman, who had acted in Yiddish theatre. She died when Chester was small, his father remarried, and the boy was largely brought up by his grandmother. His grandmother’s name was Bobby. His stepmother’s name was Syd. (In their choice of names the Americans have always been more eclectic than we are: a girl in Dynasty, for ...”

“... He mentions in the Preface to this edition that he was led by Cyril Connolly to take down the small talk of the great, but was essentially writing ‘to put a fence around my experience. In doing so I discovered an alter ego of which I am not especially fond but which, being opposed to capital punishment, I could not put to death.’ It is a cryptic ...”

“... of chemical or biological weapons. 5. Iraq is a dictatorship in a class of its own, or a very small set that includes North Korea, for violation of human rights. 6. In consequence, Iraq cannot be accorded the rights of a sovereign state, but must submit to blockade, bombing and loss of territorial integrity, until the international community decides ...”

“... But the danger lies not so much within the population as a whole, where religious extremists are a small minority (more confessional votes are cast in Israel than Pakistan), as within the Army. Officers and other ranks who have worked with the Taliban in Afghanistan and the Lashkar-i-Tayyaba in Kashmir have become infected with zealotry. At the same time ...”

“... monologues (Helen Baxendale as a servant girl, Joss Ackland as Barabbas) was also consigned to the small hours: ‘It was felt that because these dramas are considered, thoughtful pieces, they suit the later evening slots when the audience has time to sit and enjoy them.’ At the same time, paradoxically, the BBC’s public service remit seriously restricted ...”

“... as abundant as static on a broken TV. At 9 a.m. on a Wednesday, I honked the horn in front of a small adobe where Michael had spent the night with some friends. It was a clear sound in the dry desert air. Michael had left Marfa for Canada but flew back for the drive. On the phone we’d planned the trip as follows: always take back roads, eat only in ...”

“... squandered and their admission to heaven put at risk. Pain relief might be administered in small doses, except to those such as lapsed Catholics – the fear being that even small doses might prevent them from returning to the religion of their baptism. In the same volume Eugene Tesson, a Jesuit, sanctioned ...”

“... itself) and with the identity of form and meaning. Merely – though of course it was not a small ‘merely’ – he argued against the hermetic tendencies of Symboliste aesthetics. He praised Yeats for insisting that poetry was made for ordinary human beings and for ignoring the forbidding notice ‘No through road to action’, and he contested the ...”

“... one-to-one mapping of a square onto itself) discussed by mathematicians such as Stephen Smale and applies the model to historical time as the starting point for a series of reflections on the idea of progress, the invention of tradition and the importance of anachronism. But it was during the 1970s that science and technology marked ...”

“... which he wrote. Van Es’s book is a more conventionally academic study than Shapiro’s, or than Stephen Greenblatt’s Will in the World (2004), less sprightly in its prose and weighed down with scholarly apparatus. Yet, though they are barely cited, Shakespeare in Company is very much an extension of Greenblatt’s and Shapiro’s work, whose mode of ...”

“... anxiety in many battles over literary estates is familial: whether patrimony, as in the case of Stephen Joyce, who terrorised scholars with his capricious restrictions on quotation from his grandfather’s published work until it came out of copyright last year; or the lateral bonds of marriage, which produce similar dramas of insecurity. (Valerie Eliot ...”