“... distant future, writers such as Wells, Edward Bellamy (in Looking Backward: 2000-1887) and William Morris (in News from Nowhere, his rejoinder to Bellamy’s hugely influential novel) sought to vault presently insoluble contradictions. Of course, the same contradictions may well persist into the future, but the shock of the old can enable the awakened ...”

“... who prune flesh and foliage more or less indiscriminately. Mirbeau, the William Morris of death by a thousand cuts, meant his descriptions of the array of minutely calibrated torture devices to provide a critique of Western military technology and its bureaucratisation of death. That Fu Manchu, who seems to have read Mirbeau ...”

“... private presses, handwritten and illustrated by artists – beginning with the trio of William Morris, Burne-Jones and Charles Fairfax Murray, who helped launch the work after some friends came across it in a remainders box outside Quaritch’s. Two years had passed since the bookseller first published it, at the price ...”

“... the first of his books to be written in English, Pioneers of the Modern Movement from William Morris to Walter Gropius. His parents stayed in Germany where, soon after his father’s death in 1940, his mother killed herself to escape the camps. Pevsner and his family were to remain permanently in this country.The idea for The Buildings of England had ...”

“... herself repeating Vic’s Daily Mail-style arguments to her academic colleagues, and not least to Charles, her unsatisfactory lover. Charles, a fellow de-constructionist, promptly takes the hint and abandons academic life (and Robyn too), to take up merchant banking. If intellectual life, like buying and selling, is only a ...”

“... word was explained as you went along. His reading was ‘at least’ preferable to ‘readings’. Morris Brownell’s volume offers a useful conspectus of Johnson’s opinions about music, painting, architecture and landscape, and sometimes widens the scope of its title to take in Johnson’s relations with artists and to give accounts of contemporary ...”

“... clear. Watergate fans will recognise the old cast of characters, those almost-forgotten names – Charles Colson, David Young, Egil ‘Bud’ Krogh – and there is pleasure in this: a bit like watching an old horror film on late-night TV. Yet on that level Mr Hersh is not exciting. We know the Watergate story from every angle and, by now, from the memoirs of ...”

“... to a know-nothing government in Westminster. The Sydney Herald warned off Gipps with a reminder of Charles I’s fate. Somewhere in all this an independent Australian nation was evolving, but at what cost? Gipps was forced to condone the whitewashing of the Waterloo Creek massacre. The remaining suspects in the Myall Creek massacre got off. The Governor’s ...”

“... past. Time was a source of conflict for the early inhabitants of the English colonies. James I, Charles I and Archbishop Laud held that the Sabbath should serve as a day for diversion as well as for worship. The Book of Sports, a set of regulations for Sundays and Holy Days issued by James in 1618, decreed thatafter the end of divine service our good people ...”

“... points out, by communitarians and others on both sides of the Atlantic, notably Amitai Etzioni, Charles Taylor and Alasdair MacIntyre. Utilitarianism is not enough. If solidarity is to be a real presence in our lives rather than a hollow slogan, then there must be some shared focus of – I can’t think of a better word than reverence. Speeches by David ...”

“... about the machine age and its dehumanising effects, which owed something to his parents’ William Morris-inspired guild socialism. He couldn’t sell enough paintings to live, however, and found working at the Film Unit, mostly under the Brazilian Alberto Cavalcanti, to be ‘exhilarating stuff’: he had, according to Noxon, an ‘insatiable appetite for new ...”

“... settled: the woman of independent means who has done quite well for herself, as Carter described Charles Perrault’s version of the figure, who waves wands and make things happen, transcending biological relatedness and bourgeois property law. Carter, Sage proposes, ‘birthed herself’ into that position through years and decades of intellectual and ...”

“... the Council for the Preservation of Rural England (CPRE), the National Trust, William Morris’s old Society for the Protection of Ancient Buildings and elsewhere, with the old ‘Amenity Brigade’, as he was to call it. There can hardly have been a conservation or planning society in his lifetime in which he was not active, if not among the ...”

“... a pair of models, but they ‘looked sleazy’. The artist engaged to produce the paintings, Charles Raymond, took one look and said: ‘I’ll do it with my wife.’ He recalled that during the shoot, ‘We got carried away, and [the photographer] disappeared.’ This was how the images ended up depicting a quite ordinary-looking, slightly alternative ...”

“... appearance several months ago, is, I think, such a work.’ Williams’s boss’s widow later told Charles Shields, who tells the story in The Man who Wrote the Perfect Novel, that the novelist stationed himself in the English department’s outer office, in sight of the faculty mailboxes, the morning after Howe’s review reached subscribers in Colorado. A ...”