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“... splendidly atmospheric photographs by Roger Mayne, made me realise that the coffee house was by no means the unalloyed disaster I – as someone deeply involved in the project – have always assumed. It lasted only four years and financial disaster was narrowly averted after it closed in 1962, but like many socialist undertakings before and since it was a ...”

“... and demonstrators with their heads swaddled in bandages. The final images showed around twenty NF supporters, all men, giving Nazi salutes as they went into Southall Town Hall. Southall was one of the most racially diverse areas in London: in five wards surveyed in 1976, 46 per cent of the population had been born in the ...”

“... Boullée asked in the 18th century. ‘Am I to define it, with Vitruvius, as the art of building? No … To execute you must first conceive … It is that production of the mind, that creation, which constitutes architecture.’ Boullée didn’t have many chances to build and, freed from practicalities, gave rein to a remarkable architectural imagination in ...”

“... Coleman went to Wellesley College and then married Loyd Ring Coleman. She gave birth to a son, John, in 1924, contracted puerperal fever, and was confined for two months as a mental patient in Rochester State Hospital. Recovered, she journeyed with her husband to Paris, where he worked in advertising. For a while Coleman wrote a society column for the ...”

“... of the waiting area and facing the main entrance are the doors to the courts themselves. There are no windows in the building and the only source of natural light comes from one skylight. The vast majority of defendants in this as in any of the other inner-city London courts, are young white and black men who wear Tommy Hilfiger jackets and Timberland ...”

“... agents. Agnes is an agent herself (from ‘Box 500’, which seems to mean MI5), and the hero is no sooner posted to 10 Downing Street than a grenade comes through the front door. The material is that of any hard-core thriller, and very unsympathetic it is, cold-hearted in its violence and cynical about loyalty or affection. Most modern thrillers not only ...”

“... pornographic if we were not so used to them. The Greens should make us sensitive on this issue, no doubt, as feminists did on the other one. The food in the head industry may be an insult to the Third World, but it also encourages contribution to aid programmes. No longer guilty about sex, we are uneasy about anorexia and ...”

“... James Baldwin wrote, ‘but people dulled by pain can sing and dance till morning, and find no pleasure in it.’ Holiday’s bitter-sweetness – a cocktail of the rambunctious and the rueful – spoke to both sides of this conundrum. Although she was variously billed in the white music press as a ‘sepia songstress’, a ‘coloured canary’ and a ...”

“... wrong-doing and cronyism in his administration. The LAPD may be incorruptible, but there is no question that some rooms in City Hall can be bought. Taking advantage of the furore provoked by the King tape, Bradley set up a commission into LA policing which drove Gates into resignation, effective July 1992. In his ...”

“... time in the 1960s – when Christopher Logue and Adrian Mitchell have been asked to Hintlesham Hall in Suffolk to do a poetry reading. They ring the doorbell and a liveried footman tells them that they should go to the servants’ entrance. ‘I said, let’s leave. “No,” Adrian said. “We’ve come all this ...”

“... only conduct the symphony he had composed for the inaugural concert in the splendid new concert hall, he was also the architect who had designed the splendid new concert hall. On free afternoons he was a brain surgeon as well, or have I pinched that from later jokes? By page six of The Sieve of Time Leni Riefenstahl is a ...”

“... By 1963​ , John Cage had become an unlikely celebrity. Anyone who knew anything about music – who had perhaps followed the perplexed reviews in the New York Times – could tell you how he had managed to transform the piano into a one-man percussion ensemble by wedging nails, bolts and erasers between its strings; or how he had – ‘and you’re never gonna believe this’ – somehow composed silent music ...”

“... of an answer. ‘That,’ she said, ‘was F.R. Leavis.’ She lingered on the two initials. No one said anything, but it was obvious that the name was meaningless to most of us. It was another example of someone who was famous in Cambridge but otherwise unknown. He was evidently Mrs Shire’s next-door neighbour. It was hardly surprising that we were ...”

“... after the Blair to Brown handover, please note – plenty of personal differences but almost no ideological ones. And then there are the figures who travelled further in political terms than either Brown or Blair, and who in the process were critical for the way Labour shifted its political centre of gravity so far rightwards that it isn’t really the ...”

“... The interior, rarely photographed, is a mess of tacky ideas from the 1960s, reminiscent of a bingo hall in, say, Middlesbrough. Despite its name, opera cannot be performed in it; and the minor hall beside it, which can stage chamber operas, is painted close to black inside and needs only a glitter ball to suggest a suburban ...”