“... all these Vs: against! against! against! Ah’ll tell yer then what really riles a bloke.It’s reading on their graves the jobs they did –butcher, publican and baker. Me, I’ll croakdoing t’same nowt ah do now as a kid. ’ard birth ah wor, mi mam says, almost killed’er.Death after life on t‘dole won’t seem as ’ard!Look at this ...”

“... urban for its outer-suburban context’. Hatherley is even more ensorcelled by Alison and Peter Smithson’s béton brut behemoth, Robin Hood Gardens in East London (shown above). For him the Smithsons are the real heroes, and a half-century on he reprises Reyner Banham – with dialectical knobs on – by placing them and their fellow New Brutalists ...”

“... if technically difficult way to decorate a Gothic building, was obtained from the German painter Peter von Cornelius. Hugely popular exhibitions of potential schemes were held in Westminster Hall and much discussed, for the public expected a lot for their money. The scheme was supposed to encourage artists, educate visitors, stimulate the members of the ...”

“... and outrageously reactionary fantasist at the Daily Telegraph, who wrote under the pseudonym Peter Simple. Yet Wharton’s attempts to ridicule the enemies of Unionism were funny precisely because they drew on received assumptions about both Unionists and liberals. Among the most memorable creations in his gallery of bien-pensant absurdity was the trendy ...”

“... and explain how we could assist the FPs in finding *MORE* detainees.’ The problem in Madar’s reading was not just censorship but torture, which ‘as Manning well knew, remained a common practice among the Iraqi authorities even six years into the American occupation’. ‘Enhanced interrogation’ was very much Rumsfeld’s bag. In 2005 ...”

“... filmmaker, and knew what he was doing: each of his books attests to a preparatory period of heavy reading, language instruction and patient bureaucratic path-clearing. When challenged by men in uniform he always has the right permit and he’s often well-supplied with addresses of friends-of-friends. But his advance arrangements are kept behind a curtain ...”

“... of how the Milton Keynes Development Corporation lived through that sea-change makes for painful reading. The corporation had wanted to sustain a mixed ecology of buyers and renters, but as state subsidies dried up following the 1976-77 financial crisis, the corporation had to sell in order to keep building – and, once Thatcher’s policies took hold, at a ...”

“... superficial chapter. The text and pictures are separated, which does not make for easy reading, and the epilogue is placed at the front of the book, before the main text even begins. This may be a Lutyens-like joke: but such lack of concern for proportion and arrangement seems peculiarly out of place, given the subject of the book. Most of the ...”

“... all should be scandalously expensive – forgetting that if it is a book it should also be worth reading. At £25 this is a pocket-popper in quite the wrong sense. A major part of the Postscript is devoted to a defence of no less than three kinds of indeterminism. Space forbids a proper discussion of them here, but since Roger Sperry’s book, Science and ...”

“... dome, finding solace in its proportions. (In much the same way, comrades would remember him reading Dostoevsky while ‘on the run’ in the mountains of north Munster.) He featured in a number of celebrated Civil War incidents, and was finally captured in a shoot-out in Ailesbury Road, the heart of Dublin’s haut-bourgeois enclave. He brought mayhem ...”

“... We’re filming a history teacher read from Lorimer’s New Testament in Scots, the passage where Peter denies Christ and a servant quean says: ‘yer Galille twang outs ye.’ The interior of the church seems very military. I count 11 crowns among the regimental crests in the war memorial window, two British Legion flags, a drum in a glass case near the ...”

“... Moby Dick – a masterpiece which at the time of publication ‘nobody praised and nobody read’. Reading Jarrell’s praise, Stead wept. She wrote to him: ‘It is quite the loveliest thing that has happened to me in “my literary life”. That is only an expression. I do not have a literary life.’ The republication was a great success. Stead was to have ...”

“... its linkages to belief, if one only chooses to investigate it.’ Shortly afterwards, in 1984, Peter Gay, in The Bourgeois Experience: Education of the Senses, published new evidence of sexual hedonism in practice, especially in the record of one joyously sensual upper-middle-class threesome living in the Connecticut Valley at the height of Victorian ...”

“... lamely that ‘many Muslims have failed to respect these limitations.’ His book, based on a reading of the original Arabic sources, offers no explanation as to why some contemporary Muslims have deviated so far from these original principles beyond arguing that Western governments are largely to blame. They have failed to accept the Muslim nation-states ...”

“... her papers, and rush round when anything went wrong. He brought her recordings of Dylan Thomas (reading Nightwood) and James Joyce – she had never seen a tape-recorder before. After his meetings with her he wrote a diary – published as Life is Painful, Nasty and Short (1990) – in which he would report the conversations they had just had. When O’Neal ...”