“... contempt for those who fail to do so. Rachel Vinrace (significant name), the heroine with whom all we outsiders identify, turns out to have been Head Girl all along. She compiles secret reports, sees that standards are kept up, throws herself into all the school activities. Diffident, defeated, dead she might be in the novel, but the real Rachel Vinrace was ...”

“... as he found exemplified by the poet David Jones when visiting him in a Harrow lodging-house with Stephen Spender, and the ‘many lives of pastiche’. But he is aware of the origin of his woes. From 4 October 1953: ‘My deepest problem. I have changed families and at a terrible cost substituted my ideal for my real one’ – an admission of 1994 which ...”

“... than death certificate. The history of the medium took the shape of a life-cycle, she argued, and we were now in the stage of ‘irreversible decline’. Sontag mourned the loss of cinephilia, the ‘very specific kind of love’ that had dominated in the 1960s. Back then, she wrote, ‘cinema had apostles. (It was like religion.) Cinema was a crusade. For ...”

“... doesn’t necessarily have the leading role. Architects take non-art, ‘the rich oddness of what we take for granted’, the mutability, detritus and accident that define truly worthwhile Place, and replace them with something static and unchangeable. However, unlike Iain Sinclair or the London ‘psychogeographers’, with their taste for pathetic fallacies ...”

“... I’ve never robbed a working-class home.’ As he sank away towards the underworld of the crypt, we ascended the hierarchical steps to hear music by Messiaen and Hans Werner Henze. The frisson was undeniable. Earlier this year I went back to visit the disused synagogue at 19 Princelet Street – a rather dilapidated building now owned by the Spitalfields ...”

“... by longing for a lost, pre-industrial, feudal home.’ Call it Dixieland. Supplying the music (Stephen Foster’s remains the most well known) that might attend the birth of American nationalism, the minstrel show effectively affirmed a new national identity. ‘Minstrelsy accepted ethnic difference by insisting on racial division,’ Rogin writes. It ...”

“... Ernö Goldfinger or the LCC’s Architects’ Department, but also that of Lutyens, Giles Gilbert Scott, Charles Holden and lesser lights such as Edwin Cooper or W. Curtis Green. Practically every Georgian terrace they can find features in the book. They disapprove of the City’s ‘untidy and expanding cluster’ of skyscrapers, and are more pleased ...”

“... Lavers as ‘his only novel, and a love story’. Opening Roland Barthes par Roland Barthes we read, inside the front cover, white on black in Barthes’s handwriting: Tout ceci doit être considéré comme dit par un personnage de roman. What follows is text and pictures, a fractured autobiography, a dictionary of personal themes, arranged ...”

“... education in a different manner: GUISE: My Lord of Anjou, there are a hundred Protestants Which we have chased into the river Seine That swim about and so preserve their lives: How may we do? I fear me they will live. DUMAINE: Go place some men upon the bridge With bows and darts to shoot at them they see, And sink them ...”

“... If Khamenei were to refuse, he added, ‘that improves our legitimacy and then reluctantly we blow them to smithereens.’ That Petraeus was recommending Iran, a country of ninety million people, be reduced to Gaza-like conditions hardly occasioned comment: murderous threats from US officials against foreign leaders and their people no longer provoke ...”

“... tone that he would satirise more than forty years later in The Ambassadors: ‘I think that if we are to live in America it is about time we boys should take up our abode there; the more I see of this estrangement of American youngsters from the land of their birth, the less I believe in it. It should also be the land of ...”