“... bloke of a building … cantilevered pot belly poking out over tight trousers’. Its architect, Ian Simpson, has a magnificent and probably iconic light entertainer’s bouffant. His work, too, is on an epic orchestral scale: fittingly brash and boorish, now thrilling, now corny. Like the late Ricardo Bofill he suggests that singular talent and gleeful ...”

“... Blairite factotum Stephen Byers, for example, in charge of minimum wage and trade-union rights, is Ian McCartney – a Prescott protégé who declared not long ago that if he was ever cut in half, the letters TU would be found written all the way through him, as in a stick of Brighton rock. Could all this add up to a vindication for those who thought that Tony ...”

“... Jean (his sister) Forbes, plus the colourful Abe Segal, and fine Davis-Cuppers like Bob Hewitt, Ian Vermaak, Trevor Fancutt, Owen Williams – as well as the best of them, Cliff Drysdale. The connection between tennis and politics is hinted at in the extracts about and by Arthur Ashe, but there is also something to be said about the German game, whose ...”

“... of this remains obscure, and in this volume robs us of Nigel Nicolson on Alexander, A.J.P. Taylor on Beaverbrook, Martin Gilbert on Churchill, Jonathan Dimbleby on his father, John Pearson on Ian Fleming, P.N. Furbank on E.M. Forster, Philip Williams on Gaitskell, Sybille Bedford on Aldous Huxley, Michael Holroyd on ...”

“... process common to their respective historical moments. Conrad as modernist? Not exactly. Ian Watt’s idea of Conrad’s style as ‘delayed decoding’ – the bewildering perceptual fragmentation of an act or object only then belatedly identified – is more appropriate to, say, his friend and collaborator Ford Madox Ford, whose sentences ...”

“... neck and the dirty business of extracting the stones from the earth.The film takes its name from Ian Fleming’s 1956 novel, which in turn took its name from De Beers’s famously successful advertising campaign of 1947. The ads are worth seeking out: since antitrust laws prevented the cartel from doing business in the US, they couldn’t promote De Beers ...”

“... the attempted murder of Sergei and Yulia Skripal in Salisbury earlier this year, the Labour MP Ian Austin called for England to withdraw from the World Cup in Russia on the grounds that ‘Putin is going to use it in the way that Hitler used the 1936 Olympics.’ In response, Boris Johnson said: ‘I think the comparison with 1936 is certainly right. It is ...”

“... had been his life.’ The sharpest point that Marjorie Perloff makes is to quote from Ian Hamilton’s biography of Lowell, recalling his treatment of one of his mistresses, the Lithuanian dancer Vija Vetra, for whom he declared ‘undying love’, and whom he set up in a Manhattan flat, rented in the name of Mr and Mrs Robert Lowell. A few weeks ...”

“... extremity. At least now our guess can be an educated one.In Pillar of Fire, the second volume of Taylor Branch’s biography of Martin Luther King, we learn more about the extreme domestic cowardice that was the domestic counterpart to the Kennedys’ overseas imperial bluster. After the bombing of a black church in Birmingham, Alabama, and the death of four ...”

“... came to be embellished by ‘a crop of country houses … largely on new sites’. This was not, Ian Nairn insisted, ‘at all typical of the pattern in the rest of England’. You can, to quote his near double Tony Hancock, say that again, Mush.Fifty years after Harris and a few years after the heyday of the Arts and Crafts movement, the battle of the ...”

“... Fascism sharpened their national consciousness into radical activism. They included Russel Ward, Ian Turner and Bob Gollan, who were all Communists when they embarked on their careers. Their influence on Australian history was perhaps even greater than that of their British equivalents, Hill, Thompson, Hobsbawm and Rudé, since they were there at the ...”

“... terrorism in order ‘to protect the mainland’. McCartney has campaigned vociferously with Ian Paisley and Peter Robinson against the Agreement – in April, at the launch of the United Unionist campaign, he gave the clenched fist salute – and though most people regard him as a provincial politician, his policy of trying to make Northern Ireland ...”

“... Doyal’s The Political Economy of Health, N. Ginsburg’s Class, Capital and Social Policy, P. Taylor-Goobey and John Dale’s Social Theory and Social Welfare, Ian Gough’s The Political Economy of the Welfare State and Michael Harloe and Elizabeth Lebas’s City, Class and Capital. These books, and others in the same ...”

“... material, at last, that Bayard is at home with, as well as a nod to Umberto Eco’s analysis of Ian Fleming’s narrative structures. True to his initials, Simon uses his training to perform a Sherlock Holmes-like cold reading on Bayard, who responds by requisitioning him in the name of police intelligence. So begins a mismatched-buddy policier that’s ...”

“... which made picketing illegal, preparing the police and changing the guard at the NCB. Sir Ian MacGregor was the other reason this strike was unlike any other. The choice of MacGregor as chairman of the NCB was made by Nigel Lawson, Peter Walker’s predecessor. MacGregor was as convinced of the rightness of the free enterprise system as Scargill was ...”