“... In​ 1765, at the age of eight, William Blake had a vision while walking on Peckham Rye. He saw ‘a tree filled with angels, bright angelic wings bespangling every bough’. If Blake had kept going, he would have crossed the site which in 1969 became the North Peckham Estate. In postwar Britain, this forty-acre ‘mega-estate’, comprising 1444 homes in 65 multi-storey blocks, offered another kind of vision ...”

“... Chicago Cubs, playing out of beautiful, haunted Wrigley Field. In 1945 a local tavern owner called William Sianis was refused entry to a World Series game at Wrigley because he wanted to bring his goat with him (according to legend, the goat ‘smelt’, though this door policy has not always been consistently applied at baseball stadiums). Sianis chose to ...”

“... put like this. But there’s an economic problem. There are Places – in London, Sheffield or Manchester, in recent years – where the richest of unplanned, ad hoc and ‘unsafe’ spaces have coexisted with gleaming, if variable newbuild, but it’s an evanescent possibility realised only for a moment, until the next phase of the property deal goes ...”

“... away that I am only able to make him out’. This estimate would not have been endorsed by brother William. Relations between them were generally cool, and Jack was never pleased to be mistaken for the great poet or thought of as his talented brother. They were temperamentally quite different, the painter a one-man school, with no cronies, no pupils, no public ...”

“... the help of the obituary notice contributed to the Proceedings of the British Academy for 1977 by William McNeill, an American scholar who has a close affinity with his subject. Toynbee was born in 1889 into a family with Evangelical associations; like the celebrated uncle he was named after, his father was a social worker. At Winchester he was trained to win ...”

“... of the company’s tracks forming part of a single line under a single management running from Manchester through London to Dover and then under the Channel to the Continent. It was Watkin’s men who began excavating a tunnel near Folkestone in 1881, only to be warned off by the Court of Chancery for infringing the Crown’s foreshore rights. This ...”

“... the Zoopraxiscope, a rotating version of the 19th-century magic lantern. Thomas Edison, along with William Dickson, invented the Kinetoscope, the machine that launched the commercial film industry, in 1891; in Edison’s Kinetoscope Parlours viewers peeped through a hole in the top of a wooden box to watch Annabelle Moore’s ‘Butterfly Dance’, to take one ...”

“... or should own it, persisted. The mart’s apotheosis came in September 1847 with the sale of ‘William Shakespeare’s home’ in Stratford-on-Avon. This was, on the one hand, ‘a freehold plot with a cottage and attached public house’ and, on the other, as the Athenaeum put it, ‘a dwelling which has been glorified’ by Shakespeare’s ‘familiar ...”

“... his college should have a portrait of its most celebrated living alumnus. He commissioned Henry William Pickersgill – an apprentice Spitalfields silk-weaver turned Royal Academician – to produce a full-length oil painting of Wordsworth in an appropriately sublime setting, and in the early autumn of 1832 Pickersgill made the journey to Rydal ...”

“... John Carey has had access to voluminous archives stored in the Faber basement or in the keeping of William Golding’s family. No one else may see them; he alone can quote from unpublished novels, journals, memoirs, correspondence and conversations. He has made excellent use of these privileges, and the result is a full, friendly, and on proper occasions candid, account of a remarkable man, who took a long time to achieve an understanding of how truly remarkable he was, and then did so only fitfully ...”

“... English grammars were even, one might think self-defeatingly, written in Latin). William Lily’s Latin grammar, taught by royal decree in every English school for three hundred years, explained that in phrases like Rex et Regina beati, ‘the blessed King and Queen’, the adjective beati is plural (agreeing in number with Rex et Regina) and ...”

“... fourth stamp on the loans slip says DISCARDED. Despite the gallant intervention of Savoy Books of Manchester – who in 1979 set out to issue a collected edition of his works, and actually got as far as six or seven titles – by the Eighties Jack Trevor Story was an author who seemed to be no longer read, no longer published and, in the view of publishers ...”

“... and stewing; they are sweating all over; they are absolutely pining and dying for a Plot!’ So William Cobbett wrote to Henry ‘Orator’ Hunt in 1816. He did not exaggerate. The verb ‘foment’ might have been invented to describe the activities of Lords Sidmouth and Castlereagh and their spymasters in Bow Street during the turbulent 1810s. Seldom in ...”

“... a brilliant machine for the generation of property rights. Security of title was crucial. As Sir William Petty, that ingenious pioneer of statistics who himself acquired huge estates in Ireland, pointed out, ‘there can be no incouragement to industry, where there is no assurance of what shall be gotten by it.’ Jefferson was the Founding Father most ...”

“... for People’, published in a widely read paperback anthology The Exploding Metropolis, edited by William H. Whyte. Her argument in these essays – that cities can and should be understood on foot, by ordinary people, non-experts – gradually developed into a fixation with the damage done to cities by ‘projects’. Her use of the term wasn’t confined to ...”