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“... is angry because he has been kept waiting for ten minutes. He is a lanky, donnish-looking man with steel-framed spectacles and a skew-whiff tie. The clerk of the court sits in front of him, expertly manipulating files, charts and legal texts while keeping up a continuous stream of conversation with him. On the row directly in front of the clerk sit the defence ...”

“... but impossible when the two Davids answered it differently. The veiled terms in which David Steel indicated that he would find it if not impossible then inconceivable that he could work with Mrs Thatcher were more than matched by the vehemence with which David Owen indicated that Neil Kinnock was beyond the pale. The disunity of the two-headed Alliance ...”

“... body went to the De Havilland aircraft company of Stevenage. They created a shining stainless steel fuselage, attractively ridged fore and aft: they had, after all, a reputation for beautiful aeroplanes to maintain, and if someone commissioned a nuclear missile from De Havilland, they would get one obeying the minimalist aesthetics of a Shaker ...”

“... seems marvellous, when all the countries surrounding Africa are so forward in comparison,’ John Speke, discoverer of the source of the White Nile, observed. Very much a man of his time, Speke was necessarily less aware than we are today of the diversity of African societies, their extraordinary artistic wealth, and the antiquity of their trade with the ...”

“... has benefited greatly from the attentions of the Hull-based magazine Bête Noire. In the past year John Osborne, the magazine’s editor, has published a hundred of the poems now included in Goodstone, and it is very much thanks to this exposure that Voss has secured a mainstream British publisher. In Osborne’s estimation Voss addresses factory experience ...”

“... He was subjected to even more abuse from the British press and public than Nasser or John Foster Dulles. In a widely photographed incident, Altrincham was physically assaulted. His assailant shouted to the pressmen he had summoned to watch: ‘This is for insulting the Queen!’ The papers – except the Times, which on advice from the palace ...”

“... A burnished pauldron​ – the cupped steel armour protecting a soldier’s shoulder – gleams at the centre of Caravaggio’s The Taking of Christ, which in turn forms the centrepiece to the National Gallery’s exhibition Beyond Caravaggio (until 15 January). The painter keeps pace with the armourer. He flaunts an immaculate curving surface on which his own brushstrokes, like the hammer blows that preceded them, have cancelled themselves out, the better to celebrate the metal – both its hard inward darkness and the way it flashes back light ...”

“... This is a pity. The last five Liberal leaders (Sinclair, Clement Davies, Grimond, Thorpe and Steel) remain unsung. We know next to nothing of what a Liberal leader does, and we know no more from the Thorpe case. There are some sections of the Sunday Times book which are miniature essays on aspects of Mr Thorpe’s ordinary career. A chapter on him as an ...”

“... tweed.’ It seemed useful to throw that in, as various people in the room were armour-clad in the steel-blue weave that, so they tell me in Stornoway, is made specifically for the German professor market. ‘Whisky.’ Post-industrial man was making his point. Post-industrial man seems now to have cornered a nice little earner in applied pessimism. Blame it ...”

“... and the danger in them of umbrellas (‘the brass point served as a conductor, and afterwards the steel in Mrs Boddington’s stays, conveying the fluid to within a straw’s breath of a vital part in her leg’). Couldn’t this account of a mishap on young Mrs and Mr Boddington’s wedding-tour have been merely an in-joke in her letter to her friend Harriet ...”

“... by a visit to Norman Foster’s Sainsbury Centre at the University of East Anglia, an intricate steel and aluminium aircraft hanger cum Greek temple. After Krier left Stirling, he started teaching at the Architectural Association, a private design school in London which during the 1970s served as a kind of unofficial opposition to the lacklustre world of ...”

“... the fair, no longer could any city claiming to be civilised allow its skyscrapers to pile one raw, steel-framed storey on another. Instead, they had to have a stone-clad base, middle and top, in attenuated mimicry of the temple-front. No longer could Louis Sullivan, that intellectual loner among American architects, coax businessmen into lavishing his ...”

“... of progress and modern engineering, sank so rapidly as a result of brittle fracture, the low-grade steel of the period breaking violently when chilled. The bald meteorological and technological facts are overwhelmed by the irony of calm waters and fragile steel scuttling the complacency of the very rich in first class, and ...”

“... of new schools of literature has become a given, a plot point in a narrative as familiar as a John Grisham thriller or a Danielle Steel romance: somewhere, ‘out there’, a few writers are preparing the ‘next big thing’, and these writers will ‘unexpectedly emerge’, usually at a time when critics are bemoaning ...”

“... be prostitutes. He was a pimp, But in 1930, in his early forties, on meths, He heard the Reverend John Ridley at Burton Street Baptist Church, Darlinghurst, And scrapped his planned night in the down-and-out sanctuary. The piss-artist had his vocation revealed unto him – Writing Eternity. ‘I wish I could shout one word through the streets of ...”