“... These two books are a reminder that architects do usually test their ideas on themselves first. Peter Moro, who worked for Lubetkin’s practice and designed the Royal Festival Hall’s interiors, was introduced to Greenwich and Blackheath after the war by a pupil, the architect and local resident Trevor Dannatt. Moro was so impressed that he moved to a ...”

“... love for the common man, but written in such a forbidding way that the common man is unlikely to read it. Well, The Lord of the Rings is the opposite. It is a work written to keep the modern world at bay that the modern world adores. In the late 1990s, Best Book polls conducted for Waterstone’s and Channel Four, the Daily Telegraph, the Folio Society and ...”

“... loose with the dates and the references, claiming for example to have conducted an interview with Peter Lawford, the English actor and member of the rat pack, on a date some time after his death. Kelley is not just mean, or dangerous: she has a very powerful understanding of what makes a modern celebrity. She gets the journey, to use a favourite Oprah ...”

“... or on the radio, for which he was a regular conductor and occasional speaker. Or you might have read his music criticism in the New Statesman or the Sunday Referee. Like many of my generation, I first encountered him in his wonderfully perverse and entertaining 1930s book on modern music, Music Ho!, with its provocative subtitle: ‘A Study of Music in ...”

“... a long backstory, much of it chronicled three years ago by the leading journalist of the Troubles, Peter Taylor, in Talking to Terrorists (yes, Jonathan Powell lifted someone else’s title). There had been intermittent contact between the British government and the IRA throughout the Troubles. Having explored a number of channels of communication, the British ...”

“... this time, so hard my fingers slip off and jab his pulpy, wet palate. He bites my hand. As I read this scene, and others like it, I found myself thinking of William Carlos Williams’s story ‘The Use of Force’, in which a country doctor attempts to examine a young girl’s throat, checking for diphtheria. She resists; he forces her. There’s no ...”

“... embassies in the 1690s, became a bestseller, cited by Kant and Goethe. Later accounts by Carl Peter Thunberg and Phillip Franz von Siebold kept curiosity alive. But since no one else could go, Westerners continued to depend on sources that were decades out of date. Then, just as Edo opened its doors, it changed its name and began a rapid transformation ...”

“... turn of Joan Littlewood at Stratford East and George Devine at the Royal Court. In recent years, Peter Brook has taken up the baton in Stratford and in Paris. All of them demonstrated, implicitly or explicitly, that the theatre is an art, a forum, a faith, something to be fought for. At the Royal Court George Devine instilled a system of values that gave the ...”

“... arts’. Yet, when so many solemn novels are prolix, esoteric, or dispiriting, it’s a relief to read eventful tales of suspense, surprise, excitement, mystery and catharsis. E.M. Forster was wrong to deprecate the ‘story’. Shakespeare, Dickens and Dostoevsky had no such misgivings. Does this mean ceasing to discriminate between literature and ...”

“... and women whose errors are liable to multiply with the complexity of the system. How often have we read of a space launch failing despite meticulous servicing because of a trivial fault: how much truer will this be of an entire weapons system left unattended in space? To my mind it is important to make the public and political leaders aware of science’s ...”

“... self-serving memoirs of Blunt’s NKVD contact Yuri Modin and the grievance-twisted outpourings of Peter Wright, is exceedingly judicious. Indeed, the book can be read not only as a biography but as an exemplary account of the unreliability of interested witnesses.Blunt’s friendship with the talented artist Eric Hebborn is ...”

“... of Tony Benn. It is true that the record of an internal debate among the committed is not to be read as a prospectus for potential converts. But the cries of disappointment and betrayal, the denunciations of the media, Harold Wilson and the IMF, and the assumption that the answerability of Parliamentary representatives of the Left to a party executive ...”

“... books are sorted out at the discretion of a handful of his peers. It is true that just as people read reviews rather than books, they prefer short reviews to long ones, so the snap judgments of the dailies and Sundays have undue influence. But this doesn’t mean there is no place for serious reviewing. Raban knows what good reviewing is not – its purpose ...”

“... wife and children, and from his jobs. He lived as a hobo, promoted get-rich-quick oil investments, read Karl Marx and dabbled in Wobblie politics. Then he buckled down for a while and worked part of his way through the University of Kansas, where he became the creative writing programme’s star pupil, publishing stories and poems in both the university ...”

“... worked well in the same place; cut down two firs – we’re nearly up to sixty sawed-up trees.’ Read closely, though, the documents of the Imperial family are in many instances quietly touching. Nicholas and Alexandra were clearly bewildered that their good intentions went so completely awry, and they brought a naive but staunch dignity to their loss of ...”