“... everybody else was doing, so that there was too much traffic for the line to handle. And then, it took only one call to end it. There was a spate of e-mail, too, a lot of it from strangers offering guidelines on new ways to park, new methods of walking across a carpark. One unsigned set of instructions began: ‘As you already know I have been a Swat Sniper ...”

“... starting points. Names, too, are less fragile than buildings. There is evidence that some changes took place very quickly. The speed of rebuilding after the Great Fire was phenomenal. The spread of London westwards in the late 18th and early 19th centuries was also brisk. Some transformations teetered on the brink before falling back. ...”

“... the 20-year-old actor Gabriel Spencer instead of being killed by him), but Thomas Middleton and John Fletcher both died in their mid-forties, Francis Beaumont at thirty, while Henry Porter (whose Two Angry Women of Abingdon influenced The Merry Wives of Windsor) may have been still younger when he was killed in a duel by ...”

“... close of World War II. He attended Harvard, where he began a close friendship with his classmate, John Ashbery. After a year (1950-51) in Michigan writing and translating poetry, he moved to New York, where he rejoined his Harvard friends and their friends – among them the poets Kenneth Koch, James Schuyler and Barbara Guest – becoming part of a social ...”

“... teens, C.R.W. Nevinson fancied the life of a bohemian and attention-grabber. His idol was Augustus John, king of the Café Royal, and, in 1908, he decided to go to the Slade, as John had done. There he knocked around with Stanley Spencer, Mark Gertler and Edward Wadsworth in the Slade Coster Gang. They went to music ...”

“... the preparatory design for the Eiffel Tower is as stark as a modern electricity pylon, and it took on its final ornamental character only after Sauvestre’s lacy embellishments had been added. In the 20th century, architects, enthralled by what engineers could do, began to borrow from them. Before, architects had been left with the job of making extreme ...”

“... to fill in the details of his life, written with affection, humour and perspicacity by the pianist John Tilbury. Tilbury was Cardew’s friend and colleague, and a one-time (and part-time) fellow-traveller on the Maoist road; he has spent a quarter of a century writing this book. Aficionados will love his account; others might have preferred a more succinct ...”

“... The Iraq Inquiry​ , chaired by Sir John Chilcot and composed of five privy councillors, finally published its report on the morning of 6 July, seven years and 21 days after it was established by Gordon Brown with a remit to ‘look at the run-up to the conflict, the conflict itself and the reconstruction, so that we can learn lessons ...”

“... out’ for generations: the deaths of heirs, a fondness for cards and catastrophic marriages all took their toll. But after 1918, with the loss of so many men and the accumulation of death duties, it seemed that the end really was nigh. Hundreds of country houses were put up for sale that year. Less expectedly they sold in unprecedented numbers and for ...”

“... a term than Romanticism or Classicism have been in helping us to understand the art of the past. John Russell, meantime, in his new book, Meanings of Modern Art, is a little bolder. He begins conventionally enough with Manet and the 1860s, but, unlike the formalists who also took this line when formalism was in fashion, he ...”

“... Strahan, Thomas Cadell (father and son) and George Robinson in London, and Alexander Kincaid, John Balfour, John Bell and William Creech in Edinburgh, were not ‘mechanicks’ as Strahan once complained, but collaborators in a London-Edinburgh publishing enterprise that put Scotland on the literary map. For ...”

“... In May 1983 he was promoted to assistant to the chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, General John Vessey, and over the next couple of years he oversaw a secret team – operating in part out of the office of Daniel Murphy, Bush’s chief of staff – which quietly conducted at least 35 covert operations against drug trafficking, terrorism and, most ...”

“... needed prints of their works to spread their fame and standing. From 1829 until his death in 1837, John Constable grew increasingly preoccupied with printmaking and collaborated with the young engraver David Lucas to translate his oil sketches and paintings into 22 mezzotints, part of what would become known as English Landscape Scenery. Proofs survive, and ...”

“... irritated journalists on other newspapers. Part of the story he has to tell is how people like John Cole – yes, the same John Cole – and his successor as News Editor. Jean Stead, dragged the paper more or less reluctantly into mainstream, news-oriented journalism. Coming from what at the time was probably the most ...”

“... desperate hours on Malta, describes the moment when the veteran grand master of the Knights of St John, Jean de La Valette, leapt into the gash the Turks had made in the bastion of Castile, after the other fort on the island, St Elmo, had already fallen.‘Come, my knights,’ he cried. ‘Let us all go and die there! This is the day!’ When his staff urged ...”