“... remote bureaucrats forcing brutalist tower blocks on a homely and garden-loving people. But as Nicholas Bullock shows in his survey of postwar housing policy in Newham (formed by the merger in 1965 of East Ham and West Ham), this solidly Labour council’s planning was piecemeal and reactive, shaped by forces far beyond its control. Initially focused on ...”

“... beStill the indomitable Irishry.Yeats died on 28 January 1939. Two days earlier, W.H. Auden and Christopher Isherwood had arrived in New York. When Auden heard of Yeats’s death, he sought to ascertain what time of the day or night he had died. He was planning a poem. What preoccupied him most in 1939 was guilt that his gift for poetry was serving ...”

“... terms. ‘There is no plan by the university to break any trusts,’ Davies and the dean of SAS, Nicholas Mann, stated in 2007. This sounded reassuring, but it emerged in the recent court proceedings that no one in the university bothered to show the trust deed even to their in-house legal adviser until the summer of 2008. Up to that time the university had ...”

“... the Telegraph, where he was lead reviewer. Exactly how and why that paper’s literary editor, Nicholas Shakespeare, came to send Powell’s Miscellaneous Verdicts: Writings on Writers to Waugh remains obscure. As recently as January last year Shakespeare was still trying to explain the course of events in the Spectator. Waugh’s review, which he insisted ...”

“... or shame, for instance, that made Eric Blair rechristen himself at the start of his career? As Christopher Hollis tells us: ‘The reasons he gave for changing his name are oddly unconvincing. He complained that Blair was a Scots name and that he disliked Scotland because of its association with the deer forests about which his rich schoolfellows used to ...”

“... that aspired to universal coverage: the vast library that Hernando Colón, the illegitimate son of Christopher Columbus, amassed in the first decades of the 16th century as he travelled across Europe before settling in Seville, and the even richer one that Philip II of Spain created as part of the Escorial, the huge, grim complex that he built in the 1560s on ...”

“... 2001) is unhelpful. In Castes of Mind: Colonialism and the Making of Modern India (2001), Nicholas Dirks does a first-rate job of summarising the debate between English historians of India, such as Christopher Bayly and David Washbrook, who downplay the corrupting nature of empire by assigning a good deal of the ...”

“... skill with Leibniz, the astronomers Johannes Hevelius and John Flamsteed, the cartographer Nicholas Mercator and, most disastrously, with Newton, who, Hooke claimed, had plagiarised from him the inverse-square law of gravitation. If you crossed Hooke’s interests, you were in for some of the ripest abuse going: his enemies were, variously, ‘ignorant ...”

“... of, such as the new Kensington Central Library. Sometimes they dressed up as Victorians, or as Christopher Wren in a bath chair, and carried a cardboard coffin symbolising the moribund state of affairs. Boty, in costume as a Dresden shepherdess, naturally caught the public eye. Interviewed by the Daily Express in 1959 she pronounced the Air Ministry ...”

“... of the tenant with too colourful a professional life; Patrick Nicholls, suspected drunk driver; Nicholas Ridley, too loquacious an advocate of anti-German feeling; and Mrs Edwina Currie (‘most of the egg production in this country is, sadly, now infected with salmonella’). Then there is the long line of sex-scandal casualties: Cecil Parkinson, Tim ...”

“... globalism that seems to interest Anderson most is that of the mid-century émigré geostrategist Nicholas Spykman, who in America’s Strategy in World Politics (1942) – ‘perhaps the most striking single exercise in geopolitical literature of any land’, Anderson says – spared his readers the dogmas of liberal democracy and the free ...”

“... writers. Fortunately, he discovered in himself another talent, and under the pen-name of ‘Nicholas Blake’ published a series of commercially successful detective stories, the classic genteel-class literary genre of the interwar period. At this point, Day-Lewis seemed even more of a whole-hogger for ‘the Revolution’ than Auden and Spender ...”

“... novelists – a notable example being the co-operative sleuthing of Sherlock Holmes and Freud in Nicholas Meyer’s adventure The Seven Per Cent Solution. Many American and British novelists, from Truman Capote to Piers Paul Read, have taken on the non-fiction thriller. But the benefits of fictional devices to serious non-fiction, from the days of André ...”

“... material had lost her her German passport, and who therefore approached the nearest Englishman, Christopher Isherwood, and proposed that he should provide her with a substitute by marrying her. Isherwood backing down, Auden – who all his life seems to have retained and exercised his own very special form of gentlemanliness – had the buck passed on to ...”

“... for the early poems of Pasternak, whose father was a well-known artist, and Hingley refers to Christopher Barnes’s suggestion that the painting of the Expressionist school – Munch, Kandin-sky, possibly Chagall – seeped sideways, as it were, into the young poet’s vision, Where the air is as blue as a bundle of clothing In the arms of a patient ...”