“... space as you enter the building by the brightness you glimpse beyond the dimness of the entrance hall. (The same move from dim to bright is effected in the British Museum when you head for the Great Court.) The stairs are a tour de force; they swing up the wall of the well in curved flights that are counterpointed by the line of glass balustrades and steel ...”

“... The main hall of the Natural History Museum soars less dramatically than a Gothic nave, but otherwise isn’t unlike one. Light comes from high windows; there are upper galleries and chapel-like alcoves; and it is dominated by a statue in white marble of the local deity – Charles Darwin – who looks down at a huge dinosaur skeleton from the landing of the staircase that rises in a double flight at the north end ...”

“... images of its pages available on the web. The event is celebrated by a display in the entrance hall of the British Library. The library holds 347 leaves of the Sinaiticus, bought in 1933 (there was a public subscription) from the Russian government. They arrived as a single, coverless stack of quires. Now bound as two volumes they can be seen in the ...”

“... waiting outside an office for a meeting to begin. A gigantic sepia photograph of the gutted Cloth Hall in Ypres forms the background; red cap-bands are the only bright colours. It is an uncommonly fine piece of official portraiture, pleasing in its lack of eloquence.The patterned woodcuts he made in the 1890s are now – have probably always been ...”

“... yet to reach his apotheosis with the life peerage that validated his sobriquet, Lord Toad of Tote Hall. Confidant of Margaret Thatcher, columnist in the News of the World, professional diner-out and social climber, Wyatt spotted his opportunity. His diary would be a secret but was, from the outset, intended for publication. Its rationale was as a nice little ...”

“... revolutionary wheeled in a pram – Speakers’ Corner meant more to me Than did the statue of Peter Pan. The first theatre I ever saw The inside of was the Unity; Lenin and Stalin were nursery gods And at night behind the curtain There were meetings, meetings, meetings. At nursery school (Methodist, Kingsway Hall) I ...”

“... is acknowledged in the exhibition by a display mounted in the National Portrait Gallery entrance hall of photographs of 48 Portraits – oil paintings of famous men, themselves taken from photographs in an encyclopedia. Richter’s photographic starting points are old and new snapshots, newspaper illustrations, advertisements and, for the more recent ...”

“... this in a long extract from a debate between Hugh Stubbins, the architect of the Berlin Congress Hall, and Frei Otto, a young German architect. The hall, built in 1956-57, mainly with American money, stood close to the border with East Berlin. Its suspended roof dipped down between two inclined arches. Although it followed ...”

“... in the Sixties and Seventies. Victorian Gothic was applied to every building type from town hall and railway station to terrace house. In the current debate, fears and hopes about social and economic change – about what we build – get confused with arguments about design – how we build it. New building types of the last decade – hypermarkets and ...”

“... of a family history in which successive generations are debilitated by a legacy of abuse. Rodney Hall tells of a convict at large in New South Wales in 1838, caught up in larger, even more powerful cycles of captivity and exploitation, until he finds temporary sanctuary with an Aboriginal tribe and becomes ‘the very centre of their circle’. Both novels ...”

“... that rural nostalgia has been the fuel of British economic decline. One of the many merits of Peter Mandler’s superb study is that it utterly demolishes these assumptions. He shows that, by Continental standards, Britain has been exceptionally slow to protect its country houses. Political intervention has been resisted and commercial development put ...”

“... Parliament’. Speaking the next day at a Women’s Institute meeting in West Newton village hall, however, the queen herself appeared to suggest that she would prefer her subjects to sort this one out among themselves. If even the queen wasn’t up for it, there probably wasn’t much of a constituency, outside the Rees-Moggs, for seeking salvation via ...”

“... output as an architect was limited: a house in Bath and work on Lancaster Crown Court and Shire Hall provide the most substantial remaining evidence of his limited practice. The writings he left are, judging by the account Brian Lukacher gives of them in Joseph Gandy: An Architectural Visionary in Georgian England, voluminous but opaque, incoherent and ...”

“... Sickert’s Venetian pictures come after the music-hall paintings and before the Camden Town nudes and interiors. He was in the city for long periods at the turn of the last century, but even after he left, while living and working in London and Dieppe, he went on producing paintings based on things he had done and seen in Italy ...”

“... although, like a visitor in red high heels and nail varnish, it might be a bit loud in a parish hall. Arad wouldn’t be the subject of an exhibition like this one if he hadn’t also opened up territory where product design merges with gallery art.* Along the way he has had fun being original. One move is to take a design and see how it works in other ...”