“... The fire station owes the preservation of its lettering to the vigilance of a printing historian, James Mosley, and an architectural historian, Andrew Saint; and to the fact that the building is still a fire station. When the clothing store Simpson of Piccadilly became a Waterstone’s bookshop a more painful battle of badges took place. Inside, mounted on an ...”

“... streets that taper off into swamps or dump heaps’. These struggles to accommodate what Henry James called ‘our crude and silent past, our garish climate, our deafening present’ to European traditions resulted in a realist tradition which may turn out to be America’s greatest contribution to 19th and 20th-century painting. Professor Novak’s book ...”

“... way or cabbages spaced just so.Picture gardens tend to put painters off. In The Tragic Muse Henry James describes the reaction of a young painter called Nick Dormer to a garden of that sort. Nick feels himself ‘catch the smile’ of ‘named and numbered acres’. He appreciates that they have a ‘charm to which he had not perhaps hitherto done ...”

“... Westmacott’s statue of Francis, 5th Duke of Bedford still looks down Bedford Place at Charles James Fox (also by Westmacott). His hand rests on a plough; a sheep and a cherub laden with produce among his supporters record his interest in agricultural improvement. (Woburn Abbey, his country place, gives its name to local streets.) In the centre children ...”

“... its leading figures have been forgotten, or, in the case of the party’s first prime minister, James Ramsay MacDonald, disowned. The Labour left, then and since, thought the new administration was too timid and had failed to promote socialism. The centre and right of the party felt that the experience of 1924 had confirmed the dangers of taking office ...”

“... In March 1776, James Boswell and Samuel Johnson visited Pembroke College, Oxford and called on the master, William Adams. According to Richard Sher, Boswell wrote in his journal how dismayed he had been to see in the master’s library a copy of the quarto edition of David Hume’s Essays and Treatises on Several Subjects of 1758, handsomely bound in morocco leather ...”

“... book, but I cannot believe that its subject would have liked it any better than he cared for John Campbell’s 1993 biography, Heath’s own copy of which is scrawled with angry marginalia – ‘Nonsense!’, ‘No!’ and ‘Wrong!’ Campbell’s book was less alluring in style, more detailed in its accounts of ...”

“... for us to understand – a similar change in sensibility is going on now. The buildings in Colen Campbell’s great 18th-century picture-book of British Classical architecture, Vitruvius Britannicus, are shown in plan, elevation or one-point perspective. But when Soane, in the first decades of the 19th century, makes a presentation drawing he is likely to ...”

“... park on the northern outskirts of the city. For some reason he insisted that he and I and Alec Campbell, the former Conservative leader of the council (he lost his seat in May), speak in a small caravan in the middle of the field round the back.The fact that both men voted to stay in the EU cuts no ice on the doorstep. ‘When Remainers see a blue rosette ...”

“... of Beckett’s book is its wealth of portraits of individuals, among them Harry Pollitt and Johnny Campbell; Willie Gallacher and Phil Piratin, two of the very few who found a way into Parliament; Palme Dutt the Swedish-Indian, more theologian than political thinker; and Bert Ramelson, a Ukrainian-Canadian, who became a very able and effective organiser of ...”

“... totalled $250,000, and appeared to have been signed by Rice on the day before he died. When James A. Baker, a Texas lawyer whose firm had represented Rice for many years and who had drawn up his will in 1896, arrived in New York, he went to Rice’s Madison Avenue apartment, where he met Patrick. ‘I suppose you are surprised to find me in ...”

“... one parents used to snatch from under pillows – has few defenders, although faced with bans on James Bond, or Forever Amber, or Ouida or Micky Spillane, children, intuitively doing the subversive thing, have on the whole managed to find a way of getting to read what they believed would most please them. The unending duels of the cartoon films – where Tom ...”

“... guide to the exhibition by Hermione Hobhouse, and a first-class biography by Robert Rhodes James.* Albert took a long time to receive his deserts. Indeed I doubt whether he was fully appreciated during his lifetime. He was a foreigner. He disliked the rigmarole of court life and he was altogether too clever. The Great Exhibition of 1851, housed in the ...”

“... seem, by comparison, over-fleshed. In her introductory essay, Marina Warner mentions W.W. Jacobs, James Stephens, Lewis Carroll, Edward Lear and Harry Graham: a reading-list which suggests a mix of the commonsensical and the fantastical which consorts easily with the insect-headed humans and other macabre juxtapositions of Max Ernst’s collage illustrations ...”

“... the lovingly created detail’ – reference to six little photographs superimposed on drawings of James Stirling’s building for the Mappin and Webb site in the City of London – ‘as well as their scale that makes the listed buildings so important. Look at the replacement. Is somebody supposed to jump from this tower?’ It is an easy book to mock, but at ...”