“... at the Hutton Inquiry. Two hundred and fifty years ago it was numbered tickets to Westminster Hall that were in demand: two Jacobite earls and a lord were on trial there. Graphics are not what they were – no swirl of copperplate breaking into black lettering for ‘High Treason’ – but the same appetite is being served.Take the sixpenny prints of ...”

“... photograph on the jacket gives the story a sharper edge: Halle bears some resemblance to Peter Sellers in one of his manic roles. That Pei, architect of the Louvre Pyramid, thought Halle’s study out of order is not surprising, but he was mistaken if he thought it crudely reductionist. As a prelude to his analysis Halle describes the kinds of house ...”

“... What makes it special, apart from the preternaturally large looming of the Living Word Gospel Hall, is its hidden opal wealth. Four years before the week that constitutes the foreground of the story, a charismatic stranger has walked into town, clad in loose white garments and carrying a rifle. He has curls, a beard, intense and disturbing milky-blue eyes ...”

“... Street gallery window. Illustrations in the catalogue of a long-term installation in the Richmond Hall of the Menil Collection and another in Donald Judd’s Chinati Foundation suggest that you have to go to Texas if you are really serious about Flavin’s work. But like any pilgrim you will suffer a little. The publicity for the Chinati Foundation warns ...”

“... that is never complete, experience that is never direct. The music is still alive in the concert hall: old recordings indicate that it is untarnished by time – just less shocking, and, of course, not new. The costume designs are happy in museums, but costumes, to be fully understood, need bodies. From our own experience we know that although texts and ...”

“... dismissively, like the London sitters who passed the landscapes ‘ranged in long lines from his hall to his painting room’ without deigning ‘to honour them with a look’, but almost guiltily, conscious of having been distracted by that fashionable crowd. When the economical style of the portrait backgrounds is applied to cottages at dusk, cattle ...”

“... consummate performer. Randolph Churchill, Winston’s father, was said to have an ‘almost music-hall style of speaking’, while his son greatly admired the music-hall comic Dan Leno and would sing his songs with what this book enigmatically describes as ‘teddy bear gestures’. Harold Macmillan could do a superb ...”

“... commitment. Though these should be reckoned with, gratitude and thanks are what I most owe. J.C. Hall started by expressing high faith in poetry. ‘The Poem’, the first of his works kept in print, concludes: In the moment and in the swarming acre A thing is seen and gathered like a flower. Here in this room I emulate its maker And though remote I still ...”

“... out of place at one of the rock concerts advertised on the NEC’s hoardings.Inside the main hall, the queue for the bar was already twenty people deep at 10.30 a.m. Senior executives stayed away but a phalanx of lobbyists and VIPs milled around the Heathrow Airport Lounge. JCB, the construction equipment manufacturer and longstanding Conservative ...”

“... meaning, you might say that someone now was flavoured with the essences belonging to, for example, Peter Ackroyd, Anita Brookner, William Boyd, Anthony Burgess and Peter Hall. This is typical, alas. First repetition: Kenneth has left Paris, even though his father has promised to introduce him to the ‘agent who had ...”

“... No one who has read Crabbe’s poetry has ever denied the power of his portraits or his stories. ‘Peter Grimes’, one of the embedded sections of his great work The Borough (1810), is justly famous, and, were it better known, the story ‘Delay has danger’, part of the very uneven Tales of the Hall (1819), would be known for what it is, a masterpiece ...”

“... LET ME TELL YOU, IT WAS WONDERFUL.’ Maman, the giant spider already seen in the Tate’s turbine hall in 2000, protects the sac of marble eggs attached to her abdomen and menaces the viewer. ‘My best friend was my mother and she was deliberate, clever, patient, soothing, reasonable, dainty, subtle, indispensable, neat and useful as an ...”

“... There are of course older examples – Corbusier’s Ronchamp, Scharoun’s Berlin Philharmonic Hall – which didn’t result in a revolution. But Hadid, Gehry et al now have engineers to turn to who can make rounding the corner a much less onerous affair than it once was. Whether our rectilinear souls will succumb to curves and sharps in unexceptional ...”

“... of fenestration in the main storey – three or more larger central windows lighting the long hall, smaller ones lighting the rooms to either side – repeats at all scales from the largest palaces to modest houses. The sense that the fabric of Venice is still all of a piece makes the restorers’ passion for authenticity and modest intervention seem more ...”

“... screen. Take the case of bank buildings. Many grand ones have become bars. The message the banking hall once gave (probity, substance) is now written into advertising copy and it turns out that banker’s pomp fits brewer’s cheer well enough. The architectural message of Victorian pubs was glitzier and on a smaller scale (less marble, more mahogany and cut ...”