“... his strong-willed daughter back from Paris, where she had gone looking for a fresh start after a short-lived marriage to a Belgian banker, gave her the job of choosing an alternative. It was a privilege that would change her life and Building Seagram chronicles her valiant attempt to bring a bohemian spirit to a corporate building. With the help of ...”

“... on against headaches, depression and the Ministry of Information, for which she made several short films until the officials decided that Road Safety for Children was too important a subject to be trusted to a woman. The Boxes were unusual but not quite alone in their day. Jill Craigie was making documentaries and Cooke points to a clutch of films from A ...”

“... for, and was accompanied by Raymond Unwin, the future architect of Letchworth Garden City, and Philip Dalmas, a Whitmanite who drifted around the Northern countryside carrying a baize bag filled with vegetables. The visitors overstayed their welcome: they ate their vegetarian dinner, and didn’t leave until 10 p.m. During the evening, there was some ...”

“... are not written by literary men, or at least not by writers who are writing as writers. Thus Sir Philip Sidney, in the book’s opening letter, addresses himself with a terseness never found in his poetry or prose to Mr Molyneux, his father’s secretary, whom he accuses of showing to others the letters he has written to his father. In brief, pungent, most ...”

“... historians should consult his remarks on X, Catacomb, and the New English Weekly edited by Philip Mairet, a man of integrity and enthusiasm whom Sisson affectionately evokes: ‘his eyes would light up as visibly as the bulbs on a pin-table, as the ideas rattled round.’ The bohemian world of poets, painters and little magazines, the ‘natural ...”

“... to a domestic deathbed. This vision of dying brings to mind Motion’s moving elegy for Philip Larkin, in his previous collection Natural Causes (1987), which evokes Larkin facing death, not at home, but in a ‘nursing home’, and records his remark on the uselessness of poetic rehearsals of one’s end: The trouble is, I’ve written scenes like ...”

“... Girls, which featured an interview with a 21-year-old woman who had had 789 lovers. ‘Prince Philip, Mary Whitehouse, Lord Hailsham and Brigid Brophy were all quoted on what they thought about the subject.’ The only sex-related subject not permitted in the paper was homosexuality. Murdoch was against it: ‘Do you really think the readers are ...”

“... description of the revolution is brief, two pages out of four hundred. His account of the short-term causes seems to be drawn mainly from Abrahamian’s book and Farhad Kazemi’s Poverty and Revolution in Iran. These matters are not strictly his concern. But his study of the spiritual malaise from which the revolution sprang is superb. In Iran ...”

“... legislation on the preservation of hedgerows would not surprise me. On the other hand, high-yield short-stalked wheat, and peas bred to mature all at once for the viner, are here to stay. In cities warehouses are refurbished and converted to studio flats. A cocoon of scaffolding will surround a lush Edwardian facade. For a week or two sky will appear at every ...”

“... for a time, it proved. But, as we have now discovered, only for a time. For Ramsay MacDonald and Philip Snowden in 1931, read Callaghan, Carter and Mitterrand in our own day. National economic sovereignty is once again an illusion. The huge, unprecedented growth in world trade which was one of the main engines of the long boom of the 1950s and 1960s has ...”

“... be made explicit. As an approach to past attitudes and values it is, however, no primrose path, no short cut, but a route beset by pitfalls and considerably more indirect than it looks. The basic problems have been set out, clearly and persuasively, by Delooz, whose book remains the most important study of the subject. In the first place, it is important to ...”

“... especially in the early volumes. Stephen’s anti-clericalism ensured that religion received short measure in the early stages (Keble only merited three and a half pages, and St Alban and St Asaph had to wait until the supplement to get in), while Lee’s liking for literati (his first question about a potential subject was ‘what did he ...”

“... the redemptive possibilities of science in the 1930s and 1940s, when he was writing the voluminous short stories that appeared – he produced nearly 100,000 words a month – in Astounding Science Fiction, the most popular US magazine of its kind. His stories were crass, overdetermined and breezy; his heroes morally, mentally and physically superior to the ...”

“... Richard Cobb, often in a class as small as an early Christian cenacle, was to be taught life,’ Philip Mansel recalled. ‘He did not simply describe, he transformed himself into a farmer overeating merely for the pleasure of depriving Parisians of their food; a revolutionary who had marinated in envy all his life and was using his position on the Committee ...”

“... or mixed. These internalised microgeographies – of small urban pockets such as Sandy Row or the Short Strand – provide the matter of sectarian conflict, for, as the acerbic historian Joe Lee lamented, Ulster has a ‘dearth of major atheist settlements’. Geography also presents challenges on a larger scale. The incomer from ‘GB’, as Ulster folk call ...”