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“... a telephone directory, a cluster of obsolete computer monitors, an industrial-size stainless steel catering trolley, a year-old copy of the Daily Mail. A blank whiteboard was the only item in what must have been a seminar room; an A4 printout minuted a 2003 meeting with a visiting dignitary. An ordinary vacant office or apartment is just another rental ...”

“... slick and streamlined, everything made out of something else. Celluloid, rubber, chromium-steel everywhere, arc-lamps blazing all night, glass roofs over your head, radios all playing the same tune, no vegetation left, everything cemented over, mock-turtles grazing under the neutral fruit-trees. But when you come down to brass tacks and get your teeth ...”

“... The sculptor​ David Nash has lived and worked in Snowdonia for half a century, and the exhibition of his work currently on view at the National Museum of Wales in Cardiff (until 1 September) is a tribute to his time in the region. Born in Surrey in 1945, he moved to the once flourishing slate-mining town of Blaenau Ffestiniog in 1967, the year he left Kingston School of Art ...”

“... A burnished pauldron​ – the cupped steel armour protecting a soldier’s shoulder – gleams at the centre of Caravaggio’s The Taking of Christ, which in turn forms the centrepiece to the National Gallery’s exhibition Beyond Caravaggio (until 15 January). The painter keeps pace with the armourer. He flaunts an immaculate curving surface on which his own brushstrokes, like the hammer blows that preceded them, have cancelled themselves out, the better to celebrate the metal – both its hard inward darkness and the way it flashes back light ...”

“... the West Country who ‘brought and made a secure place for pre-industrial England in the iron and steel of the Victorian Age’. Which is all very fine, except that there is something decidedly iron-and-steel also about a cricketer who chose as Grace did to play day in, day out, for as many teams as he could, and who piled ...”

“... incantation, pure sound. This is something it can never achieve; but it can play with the idea. David Means’s first collection of stories, Assorted Fire Events, teeters on the edge of incantation in long, mesmeric, many sub-claused sentences that threaten to lose you as they go on. I admire his sense of rhythm. At the same time, his writing possesses a ...”

“... in 1984 was that mass picketing was not going to be permitted to shut down anything – neither a steel plant, nor a coking plant, nor a power station, nor a pit where working miners wanted to work. Power in the coal industry hung on a long-drawn-out scrum. Pickets pushed one way, the police pushed back. It was good fun for fit men, though God help anyone who ...”

“... along Devil’s Tower Road to what looks like the only other feasible access, a pair of open steel gates in a solid, well-painted yellow wall. It’s Royal Navy property, apparently. A young serviceman in a blue uniform and beret was here earlier. Now the yard inside is deserted, seemingly disused. Nothing could be less shipshape or Bristol fashion. The ...”

“... into a limestone outcrop. Its mouth is five feet high, partly built up with masoned blocks, its steel-bar door locked. Through it we can see a thick brown crucifix on a rough-hewn plinth and a flagged floor. The sides and slanting roof of the cell are raw grey rock. In this refuge, this living grave, S. Alessandro Falconieri slept, prayed, shivered and ...”

“... but the main restraint on investment and production at the time was the (lack of) availability of steel, which was not used in housing. Similar arguments apply to other sorts of consumption: food imports, for example, could have been cut in order to give British workers the same calorific intake as German ones, and the dollars so saved used to reduce ...”

“... Groucho’s moustache, glasses, cigar, wing-tipped head of hair, Chico’s sly open mouth and steel-wool hair identifying the ersatz Italian Jew. The three faces jump out at you from the sheet music for A Night at the Opera in Al Hirschfeld’s 1935 collage. There’s Al Freuh’s jaunty economical outline of, unmistakably, the showman George M. Cohan ...”

“... to City Limits as part of a strategy to get herself a job at the Guardian, then in the designer David Hillman’s font-butting, G2-adding incarnation: she loved the Guardian intimately, like a lover, the way it cropped its pictures, its Garamond and Helvetica and heavy rules. I, on the other hand, was completely clueless. Between Deborah and Nick ...”

“... stemmed from the basic nature of his approach. He tended to begin with urban agglomeration (what David Reeder in his useful introduction calls ‘accretive growth’), seen as a process of population concentration, with resultant shifts in the national rural-urban balance, together with related demographic changes within the two modes of life. From ...”

“... materials, products and techniques, and implements them when appropriate: 90 per cent of the steel in the Hearst tower is recycled, for example, and the renovated Reichstag building produces an energy surplus. This concern with ‘sustainability’ is altogether praiseworthy in a world where buildings consume far more energy, and emit far more carbon ...”

“... not dream of superseding them. In the early Eighties, only the Jenkins wing of the SDP and the Steel wing of the Liberal Party argued without inhibitions for the mixed economy. We are all – or nearly all – Jenkinsites and Steelites now. Like the citizenship theme, however, the mixed-economy theme is as confused as it is insistent. A dwindling band of ...”