“... you can find the major buildings of Berthold Lubetkin and Tecton, the houses of Connell, Ward and Lucas, Maxwell Fry or Ernst Freud, and utopian one-offs such as Wells Coates’s Isokon building. It was also in Camden in the late 1960s and early 1970s that this white-walled, abstract, often low-rise high modernism was emulated in social housing, in ...”

“... country … The silence, I find, is a factor which has enabled the evil to spread.’ Likewise John Gordon, in the Sunday Express, who seized on John Gielgud’s arrest for importuning in 1953 as a chance to rip aside the ‘protective veil’ of delicacy around this ‘repulsive’ and ‘peculiarly ...”

“... Even those determined to assimilate – like the successful businessman who buys one of the shoes John Lennon was wearing the day he was murdered, and religiously slips it on every evening – are torn between Vietnamese and American customs. The stories skilfully trace the dilemmas and pains of immigrant experience, and they also constitute a wide-ranging ...”

“... pantheon. But unlike such Oxford contemporaries as Trevor-Roper, Maurice Bowra or even John Sparrow, all of whom have been well served in recent biographies, Cobb was never a college head, and this may go some way to explaining his subsequent eclipse. It was a role for which he was epically unsuited, given his (very un-French) disdain for ...”

“... he does not call these pieces poems.’ From the heart of the London literary establishment Sir John Squire described The Waste Land as a poem for which ‘a grunt would serve equally well.’ Eliot’s 1925 collection, which included ‘Gerontion’, seemed to Squire ‘obscure so inconsequent . . . Why on earth he bothers to write at all is difficult to ...”

“... the taxi-driver – who else? – of the death of the American Ambassador. It was August 1968, and John Gordon Mein had been assassinated that morning. This was an abrupt introduction to the complexities of Guatemalan politics, and I merely assumed – with the Vietnam War and the less-publicised Guatemalan guerrilla war of the Sixties well underway – that ...”

“... starve me out,’ he said, ‘they’ being probably not only his ex-friends at Emmanuel but F.L. Lucas, especially detested for being at King’s and associated with Bloomsbury, and E.M.W. Tillyard of Jesus, an inveterate and skilful enemy. So his life was often a series of fights, under Cambridge rules, but he could probably conceive of no ...”

“... account for most of the population of Patagonia) but the Scotch – fortified, according to Lucas Bridges, with a sense of moral rectitude that they were sparing them the indignities of civilisation.’ This observation brings me to the prompt for my own back-country tourism. I was in pursuit of my Scottish great-grandfather Arthur Sinclair, from ...”

“... provided much of the rationale for deregulation; the second wave of free-market economists (Robert Lucas, for example, or Gary Becker), who took apart the field of macroeconomics in favour of game theory, behavioural economics, rational expectations and other individualist approaches; and journalists like George Gilder and Jude Wanniski who recast the market ...”

“... scene that has no source either in ancient accounts or in Graves’s narrative, he has Caligula (John Hurt) take on the guise of Jupiter and cut the baby Drusilla is carrying from her belly and – on the model of some versions of divine gestation and paternity in Greco-Roman myth – eat the foetus. The ‘Caesarian’ itself was not shown on screen, but ...”

“... bullshit, his own as well as others’. In the 16th century most of these men were Spanish. Lucas Vázquez de Ayllón was fifty when the Holy Roman Emperor Charles V mandated his expedition to Chicora, in present-day South Carolina, which slave raiders claimed was a ‘New Andalusia’. Ayllón funded the voyage himself, banking on future ...”

“... as a way of allowing honourable men to stay in office without appearing to want to do so. John Nott offered his resignation after the Falklands invasion but he allowed himself to be persuaded by Mrs Thatcher to stay in office. William Whitelaw has written that he wanted to resign as Home Secretary after an intruder had entered the Queen’s bedroom in ...”

“... profession and the other asylums of London (especially Hoxton) when necessary. Lamb’s brother John had urged him not to take on this task: it was typical of Lamb to say that he understood John’s reasons for saying this, and thought no less of him for it, while disregarding his advice. The history of the fate of insane ...”

“... Reformed Protestantism is often called Calvinism, after the French Reformer John Calvin, but that is a mistake; the Reformed had many and varied leaders and thinkers of significance, and one of the things that annoyed the Reformed about Lutheranism was its idolisation of the single figure of Martin Luther. There was good reason for ...”

“... in debt, had a near-death experience. In 2005, Alain Senderens, of the three-star Paris restaurant Lucas Carton, handed back his Michelin stars, following the example set in London by Nico Ladenis and bad-boy star-chef Marco Pierre White. The burden was too much, and the economics didn’t compute. Convinced that Michelin requires a soigné ambience, Senderens ...”