“... the Reliance Controls factory at Swindon by the structural engineer Anthony Hunt and the young Norman Foster and Richard Rogers, who were then part of Team 4; and the first hyperbolic paraboloid roof in Britain, created in 1957 by Robert Townsend for the Wilton Royal carpet factory. Townsend’s own house in the ...”

“... it were to be wished of all wise men and Her Majesty’s good subjects,’ he wrote to Robert Dudley, ‘that one of these two queens of the isle of Britain were transformed into the shape of a man, to make so happy a marriage, as thereby there might be a unity of the whole isle.’ Portrait of Mary, Queen of Scots by François Clouet ...”

“... which set the vanished child above reproach. Cry as you will, take what you need, the night is young and limitless our greed. Where does Prynne come from? The question is not one of origin or influence but of approach. It is important to insist – in advance of the predictable accusations of élitism, difficulty and so on – that there are many ...”

“... national contexts at all, and misses some of the best French material altogether (such as Robert Martin Lesuire’s corrosively funny 1760 novel Les Sauvages de l’Europe, a virtual catalogue of anti-English stereotypes). And without contextualisation, the observers, like the observed, blend together into a homogeneous mass. This problem undermines ...”

“... of the barbed wire spring holds full sway,’ Mary Berg wrote in 1941. ‘From my window I can see young girls with bouquets of lilac walking on the “Aryan” part of the street. I can even smell the tender fragrance of the opened buds. But there is no sign of spring in the ghetto. Here the rays of the sun are swallowed up by the heavy grey pavement.’ The ...”

“... of the gendering of fantasies of remote control. In an 1892 article on female circumcision, Dr Robert Morris declared that ‘the clitoris is a little electric button which, pressed by adhesions, rings up the whole nervous system.’ Dr Morris’s intervention provoked some panicky speculation as to the way that amount of pleasure might be brought speedily ...”

“... finds his father again in strange circumstances. The scene was once famous, at that high noon when Robert Louis Stevenson thought Meredith second only to Shakespeare. Roy has become a sort of court jester for a German margravine and – to cut a long story short – has agreed to pose as a newly erected equestrian statue in bronze, so that she can win a ...”

“... liability’ offences, and efforts (often highly controversial) to tame and civilise recalcitrant young offenders. Progressive ideas about poverty, which from the 1900s to the Fifties circled around the issues of mental deficiency and biological-cum-cultural heredity, have swung dramatically in the direction indicated by Wootton – towards seeing poverty ...”

“... of adulthood, she soon starts to wreak havoc. She engages herself to Archibald McCandless, a young medical colleague of Godwin’s (the novel is actually written in the form of McCandless’s memoirs, heavily annotated by Gray), but, hungry for experience, chooses first of all to elope with an unscrupulous solicitor, and leads him a merry, financially ...”

“... are] cowards, loungers, without majesty, without awe, antiquity, foresight, character; old bucks, young bucks, and Biddy Buckskins. He runs on colloquially, ‘talking’ warmly and unselfconsciously. If only his friends could do the same. Since Bridges destroyed his own letters to Hopkins, the new material in this edition – the letters back to Hopkins from ...”

“... all that clever-clever experimental Nabokovian crap he thought of his son as writing. And when young the poncey smartarse was a leftie (by his father’s standards, anyway), and would go on about it. But one is still left envying aspects of Martin’s relation with his father, Kingsley buying his early post-pubescent sons a gross of condoms or doing his ...”

“... mood was infectious among the personnel in charge of exterminating the brutes. The Atlantic’s Robert Kaplan cheerfully reported that ‘Welcome to Injun Country’ was the refrain among American soldiers worldwide. The primal blood-lusts of the war on terror survived Obama’s renaming of it. The Seal Team that in 2011 eventually scalped Osama bin Laden ...”

“... to failure and the posthumous honour of indie renown. The largest exception to the rule, as Robert Kolker and Nathan Abrams show in Kubrick: An Odyssey, owed his escape to a coalescence of luck and preternatural self-confidence.Kubrick is a comprehensive Life. It yields, in orderly procession, almost every fact a scholar or a fan might want; and a fair ...”

“... opinion, his is the best, and psychologically the most convincing, account of how a well-educated young American of the 1950s and 1960s could think of himself as a ‘liberal’ and still be a committed Cold Warrior. As he says, ‘whether we had a right – any more than the French before us – to pursue by fire and steel in Indochina the objectives our ...”

“... sympathetic study of the ‘post-millennial’ generation (born since 1995), Gen Z Explained, Robert Katz, Sarah Ogilvie, Jane Shaw and Linda Woodhead find students sifting through online materials and module choices in search of whatever seems most ‘relevant’ to them personally, or to the task they happen to be engaged with at that moment.* This ...”