“... an image in Britain and America as vaguely hippyish lefty liberals, went one step further than Margaret Thatcher ever did. The Dutch establishment weaves a subtle web of complicity and patronage that binds its members together over generations, discouraging discussion of the past with outsiders. Ruud Lubbers, who as prime minister from 1982 to 1994 led the ...”

“... tunnels on top of each other to avoid running below privately owned foundations, as at Chancery Lane and Notting Hill Gate. The consequence was the series of sharp curves and gradients which still jolt passengers today but in the early days of the Tube were more extreme, often hurling travellers against each other. Since the City & South London ...”

“... through the Blackwall Tunnel (where a single misdirected lorry, trying to pick up time in the fast lane, can get trapped by prophylactic stalactites, and bring London to a standstill). I’d been to the Millennium Experience site in the early days, before the tent was erected, and I was intrigued, a year on, when the LRB offered me the chance of a second ...”

“... of a shelf of towers. Michael Heseltine, a wild-haired, mad-eyed visionary (Klaus Kinski to Margaret Thatcher’s Werner Herzog), pushed Docklands across the Thames to the East Greenwich Peninsula, Bugsby’s Marshes. The obsessive, neurotic and delusional Millennium Dome concept was a remake of Fitzcarraldo, a film in which suborned natives (expendable ...”

“... its territory, I do find myself often choosing the same spot. One regular place of worship is a lane on the outskirts of Leeds between Arthington and Harewood. It’s a nice location and of some historic interest, as in the 16th century the land belonged to an ex-Cluniac monastery that was among the properties (they included Kirkstall Abbey) granted to ...”

“... is covered and pierced in many ways, by church steeples, nuclear reactors, safari parks, six-lane highways, ruined monasteries, radio telescopes, wind turbines, landfill sites, golf courses. Mostly, though, it’s a patchwork of oblongs of open ground stretching to the horizon, blocks of single shades of green, brown and yellow, marked at the join by ...”

“... and the National Gallery in London over the return to Ireland of the pictures of her nephew Hugh Lane, who had drowned on the Lusitania. On 28 March 1917, six months after he wrote the poem, when Yeats arranged to have 25 copies published to be distributed to friends, he wrote to the printer: ‘Please be very careful with the Rebellion poem. Lady Gregory ...”

“... further up from the Turners, looking at Constable’s The Cornfield. We see an English country lane at harvest time where nothing is unusual but everything is spectacular. Corn spills down an embankment, going to grass and ferns, going to pepper saxifrage or hog’s fennel, dandelion and corn poppy, down to a stream. Giant trees reach up to the ...”