“... from the New World, including a 16th-century watercolour of the Mines of Potosí and a blue and white jar produced in mid-17th-century Mexico, were acquired by Huntington himself, but most of those in the collection have been added in recent years. These will be critical to the museum’s success with the largely Hispanic local community when the ...”

“... at Henley and John Outram’s Isle of Dogs pumping-house. It stretches to high technology in Michael Hopkins’s stand at Lord’s cricket ground and to eclectic neo-vernacular in Jeremy Dixon’s crow-stepped-gabled housing in Docklands. Among the targets for the Prince’s brickbats are London’s Royal Free Hospital, most new building in the City of ...”

“... of 1964 and George Brown) and will promote information technology and biotechnology (‘the white heat of a new industrial revolution’ revived). But he then shows a lack of coherence that suggests that he neither understands nor cares. Labour ‘should become a party of sound money’ because its supporters are the worst hit by inflation (not, on the ...”

“... disconcerted by Margaret’s genteel chain-store ways; her ‘standard English was the off-white kind favoured by hotel receptionists and vendeuses of posh slap’; Daisy is a hyperaesthete of choice and rare vocabulary (the fact that she’s half-Dutch is, I think, suggested as an explanation for her preternaturally keen ear for diction and ...”

“... Maurice Hewlett and my favourite, the Arthur Conan Doyle of the Brigadier Gerard stories and The White Company. As Adrian and Michael Cox’s Oxford Book of Historical Stories may confirm in due course, I suspect that there has been a continuous tradition from the great Victorians right through to Patrick O’Brian ...”

“... already had a couple of unsettling epiphanies this soccer year. Out of habit, I battled my way to White Hart Lane on the first day of the season, expecting to savour the ten-year-old’s sensations I’ve been savouring for thirty years: the verdant sward, the August sun, the eager, shirt-sleeved throng and, best of all, the certain knowledge that my ...”

“... still quiet – a far cry from its days as a fruit and flower nexus. I read in the Observer that Michael Caine’s father had worked in one of the London markets. Now the Market – like Caine – is gentrified, no stalls, shops or clientele operating much before 11 a.m. The figures, when we spread them out on our desk, are still below profitability, but ...”

“... was the final episode of the fifth season of Dynasty, when Amanda Carrington’s wedding to Prince Michael of Moldavia is interrupted by a gang of Balkan rebels bursting into the royal chapel and shooting everyone down with machine-guns. The vaporous metaphorical role played by music in Bel Canto is taken in Patchett’s new novel, State of Wonder, by medical ...”

“... and poisoning. He is at his best when he lets himself be carried away. Diving into the sea is a ‘white-noise smash, followed by a sudden, astonishing emergence in a silent blue world’. Contemplating the rock through which Victorian engineers ‘punched their way’, he writes: ‘Free as I was to stand and stare, the exposed stone seemed to catch me up out ...”

“... At the same time, the War Cabinet sanctioned an expedition to Murmansk to fight the Germans and White Finns, first in co-operation with the local Bolsheviks but soon in opposition to the wishes of the Soviet Government. Presenting entirely new information far beyond the imaginings of a novelist, Mr Kettle describes how the British competed with the Germans ...”

“... of the state. In Saydnaya there were regular mass hangings in the basement of the prison’s ‘white building’. Political power, which had once been expressed through the Baath Party, was increasingly concentrated in Assad’s immediate circle and formerly powerful autonomous institutions lost all influence. Part of the reason for Assad’s rapid ...”

“... Italy and that the areas of poverty precisely corresponded to the areas of poverty of that land. Michael Foot, she feels, is altogether too old and she did not share his belief that if Reagan could make it to the White House he could do the same. She adds the surprising comment that he is more suited to the trench warfare ...”

“... and was sitting at the top of the New York Times bestseller list, a place usually reserved for Michael Crichton or Tom Clancy. The book’s success is a categorial surprise, since literary novels hardly ever reach a mass audience in America; but its subject-matter is so perfectly resonant with the tenor of the times that its appeal is transparent. The book ...”

“... but they give themselves away when they do. Moby-Dick avoids anything too obvious by devising the white whale as an enormous marine pallet, which is then stacked with anxieties about God and nature and human ambition, offset from time to time by Ishmael’s debunkings (‘Genius in the Sperm Whale? Has the Sperm Whale ever written a book, spoken a ...”

“... first time I saw, or looked repeatedly at, a painting by Frank Auerbach was in the art historian Michael Podro’s living room – it must have been in 1968. The painting was Primrose Hill, Autumn Morning. I’d barely heard of Auerbach at that point (modern painting for me was French and American), and I certainly didn’t have a clue who had done the ...”