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“... evidence of his intentions, we now have from Taschen a sumptuous five-volume box set edited by Alison Castle, which contains stills, scripts, interviews, autobiographical fragments and helpful introductions to each of the films. The scripts, in particular, make it clear that Tati’s methods left no room at all for improvisation. He planned in advance ...”

“... These three women writers were mythmakers. Alison Uttley created Little Grey Rabbit (1929-1973), Richmal Crompton thought of Just William and kept him going for 48 years, May Annette Beauchamp invented herself as Elizabeth. All three of them were, and had to be, resilient women, gallant survivors, Elizabeth in particular ...”

“... be wrong with Morgan’s prose, as with other fine writing of the period. This is the library of a castle in Holland. ‘Here indeed the hours went by in untroubled calm, there being in old books, as in a country churchyard, so deep and natural an acceptance of mortality, that to handle them and observe their brief passions, their urgent persuasions, now ...”

“... uncertain. She dubs Wemmick in Great Expectations, the lawyer’s clerk who lives in a miniature castle in Walworth, ‘middle class’, adding that ‘his fellow gardeners may well have been working class.’ Dickens places him nicely as an aspirant. His portable property and garden ‘estate’ separates his home and his Aged Parent from the sordid world ...”

“... have been close to half past ten, because there was a sudden burst of fireworks over Edinburgh Castle – a nightly feast in August as the military tattoo concludes its parade. In his boyhood, Robert Louis Stevenson would sometimes be surprised while walking in the New Town to ‘see a perspective of a mile or more of falling street, and beyond that woods ...”

“... and an unmarked grave at ‘some crossroads where the omnibuses now stop outside the Elephant and Castle’. For a playwright, a film director or an architect, a room of one’s own isn’t enough. Those of Cooke’s subjects whose work required them to exercise authority, to organise and control large numbers of people, subverted conventional hierarchies ...”

“... after seven years and goes wandering in a countryside devastated by war. Finding herself in the castle of her lost prince’s betrothed, a sinfully ugly bride who sprains her ankle on the wedding-day, Maid Maleen exchanges identity with her and goes, protected by the veil, to the church. Nettles in the path are instructed to recognise Maleen as the true ...”

“... extraordinary range of reading. In what she describes as ‘a biographical note on the text’, Alison Light, Samuel’s widow and one of not many contemporary scholars who can write as gracefully and entertainingly as he did, tells us among other things about his elaborate methods of annotation, the cutting and pasting, the shifting of papers from one to ...”

“... the walls calls to mind the Bourbon Kings of Naples, who once a year ordered the construction of castle edifices made of stout edible materials – gigantic hams, cheeses, enormous mortadelle, and the fore and hindquarters of deer and Indian buffalo, in order then to gloat at the spectacle of the starving Neapolitans – admitted at the moment of completion ...”

“... or not altogether sure that they didn’t agree with the Nazis. Several of the 29 women who told Alison Owings about their lives during the 12 years of the thousand-year Reich admit that they wanted the Jews ‘pushed back’. But ‘that they would be killed, that would never have been the idea,’ Ursula Meyer-Semlies says, after reeling off a list of ...”

“... The political dictator differs only in degree from the suburban tyrant treating his home as his castle or ruling his family with a rod of iron. The university lecturer imposing himself on docile minds and the civil servant lording it in the corridors of power are both little Hitlers, swept together in Woolf’s rhetoric: ‘The whole iniquity of ...”

“... status was uppermost in Tincknell’s mind as he led me, together with his head of communications, Alison Dykes, through freshly landscaped grounds – hardwood decking, raised flowerbeds, gravel pathways – towards the sales suite, pointing out on the way a scale model of the power station about the size of the average family home. ‘Isn’t it ...”

“... estate, which ‘conjures up the now familiar and haunting spectre of urban alienation’. Alison and Peter Smithson’s Robin Hood Gardens in Poplar is a ‘particularly depressing place to live in’, with an ‘almost manic system of walls and moats’, mainly an ‘example of the late modernist avant-garde determination to realise a theoretical ...”

“... An appendix provides a series of potted biographies of country estates such as Longleat, Beauvoir Castle and Sandringham: but none of their head gardeners receives like attention. If little is known, then this should be made clear. It would seem that country-house archives and other sources may yet yield good material for a more scholarly examination of such ...”

“... On​ 11 December, the director of public prosecutions, Alison Saunders, announced that all outstanding cases against Mirror Group journalists for phone hacking would be dropped, and that no corporate case would be brought against Rupert Murdoch’s News UK for hacking or perverting the course of justice. It was Christmas come early on Fleet Street, but that isn’t the way the papers chose to tell it ...”