“... Fox says, ‘the spirit of the new entered Houston.’ Nearly twenty years later he designed with John Burgee the first of his giant commercial buildings, Pennzoil Place. It stands towards the edge of the Downtown cluster of corporate towers, and makes a subversive play on them by actually being two towers, only ten feet apart. Their surface is refinedly ...”

“... motion, much to the consternation of Tory strategists at Westminster and Labour spin-doctors both north and south of the Border. When the votes were counted, the unionist parties picked up over two-thirds of the seats in the new Parliament. Despite the undoubted drift away from Britishness over the past decade or so, the SNP took a slightly lower share of the ...”

“... as well surrender hope right away. I was still an art critic in those days, and I would drive from north-east of Los Angeles, where I was supposed to settle into my new suburban existence, over to the downtown museums, look at some art, and drive back. But when I got home I would find that the hours I’d spent negotiating freeway merge lanes and entrances and ...”

“... own national assemblies. In Southern Europe, these are generally much lower than those of the North, because it’s assumed that deputies will maximise the perks of office. The notion that expenses should be validated by receipts would greatly increase the load on the generally less efficient bureaucracies of the South. The pragmatic solution therefore is ...”

“... by the 19th century, when the French imaginaire was dominated by a Near East which included North Africa, and when the term croisade had long been at home in the French language (the English and German equivalents did not appear until the 18th century), the French saw the crusades as historically theirs, and French scholars dominated the ...”

“... hydrology, the drainage of the fens and the settlement and dispossession of Indigenous land in North America. This is the kind of Olympian perspective demanded by the planetary crisis and, it seems, by current historiographical tastes: The Burning Earth has received prizes from, among others, the Toynbee Foundation and the British Academy.It’s easy to ...”

“... allowing a glimpse of Venice across the lagoon, then retreats into the campagna. As we headed north, the hills bulked larger and darker. We got off the train at Conegliano, just north of Treviso, where we caught a bus to Tezze di Piave. I picked some straggly poppies at the roadside. Tezze is a small town, much prized ...”

“... father was a printer’s overseer for a Nonconformist weekly on Fleet Street, from a line of North Wales plasterers and stonemasons. His mother’s family were pure Rotherhithe: boatbuilders and shipwrights, her father a mast-and-block maker competent ‘in all that belongs to a ship’s carpentry’. Starting out as a teacher and governess, Alice Jones ...”

“... boosterism in a single press release. The new plant was ‘testament to the skilled workers of the North-East’, it would put Britain ‘at the helm’ of the ‘global green industrial revolution’, it would ‘level up’ the ‘industrial heartlands’. It was ‘a major boost’ and ‘a resounding vote of confidence’. It would ‘unlock ...”

“... governor who won the Iowa caucuses in 2008. Huckabee believes ‘that there’s more freedom in North Korea sometimes than there is in the United States,’ because ‘Christian convictions are under attack as never before … We are moving rapidly towards the criminalisation of Christianity.’ He has noted that ‘in the world I come from and choose to ...”

“... Brown was one of the convenor/editors of the Red Paper for Scotland in the early Seventies, and John Lloyd saw the inside of the Communist Party before helping to found a pro-European Marxist tendency at about the same time. Rather touchingly, he uses the chorus of the ‘Internationale’ to supply the chapter headings of his ‘CounterBlast’, which is ...”

“... through anxiety and depression. Most mornings, the car that took him from his home in St John’s Wood to the Observer offices near Fleet Street would divert to Sigmund Freud’s old house in Maresfield Gardens, Hampstead, where Freud’s daughter Anna still saw patients. There, Astor would spend a daily analytic hour on the couch attempting to ...”

“... time, and its chief spent his evenings discussing Armageddon theology with strangers. Oliver North recruited convicted narcotics smugglers to run the secret war against Nicaragua. George Bush recruited Manuel Noriega to the CIA. As the Watergate hounds closed in, Henry Kissinger was implored to sink to his Jewish knees and join Richard Nixon in prayer on ...”

“... in San Francisco. Learn to whistle at five’ – before moving on to bigger things: ‘“North of Boston”. Address Great Poetry Meal. Decline. Later works. Doesn’t seem to die. Attempt to write “Crossing the Bar”. International copyright. Chief occupation (according to Who’s Who) pursuit of glory; most noticeable trait, patience in the ...”

“... of Bishop’s poems survived. She conjured up what Robert Lowell in 1947, in his review of her North – South, called ‘something in motion, weary but persisting’, and then moved to something exact and specific, something human and fragile, what Lowell identified as ‘rest, sleep, fulfilment or death’. She delighted in the exotic, in the ...”