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“... How Blake would blench at the ends to which the English left has turned his poem. The vagueness of his vision of Jerusalem helps to make it the handiest of slogans. Officially appropriated as the New Labour anthem to replace the robust ‘Red Flag’, here we have it dusted down again by Tristram Hunt to front a passionate, kaleidoscopic but wilful defence of the Victorian city ...”

“... but it is particularly hard to decide what is due to the architect and what to the engineer. Andrew Saint, in his new book, sees them as sibling rivals, and in tracing how their relations have changed over time, looks for answers to three questions. Was there a time when the roles of architect and engineer were indistinguishable? If so, how and why ...”

“... lettering to the vigilance of a printing historian, James Mosley, and an architectural historian, Andrew Saint; and to the fact that the building is still a fire station. When the clothing store Simpson of Piccadilly became a Waterstone’s bookshop a more painful battle of badges took place. Inside, mounted on an upstairs wall you can still find the old ...”

“... had mercury poisoning. In his concluding essay ‘The Fate of Pugin’s True Principles’, Andrew Saint reviews his influence, fine-tuning in the light of recent research which shows, for example, that Ruskin had read rather more of Pugin than he admitted. Saint also prises Pugin from the grip of what he calls ...”

“... to dramatise essentials. In that picture it streams past Christ to highlight the faces of the saint and his companions who are gathered round a table.Bodies overlap. The shadow cast by one figure obscures the face of its neighbour. Other faces are in the dark because they are turned away from the single light source. There is hardly any architecture, only ...”

“... For​ the wit, Whig and clergyman Sydney Smith it was ‘the golden parallelogram’. The area bounded by Hyde Park to the west and Regent Street to the east, extending north to Oxford Street and south to Piccadilly, enclosed ‘more intelligence and ability, to say nothing of wealth and beauty, than the world had ever collected in such a space before ...”

“... good at appearing not as they are, which may be one of the reasons Marilyn Monroe became such a saint of modern culture in the first place. But maybe – just to run with the hare and the hounds for a second – we are asked to be more interested in the story of the story than in the story itself for simpler reasons. Maybe it’s just what Damon Runyon ...”

“... not being cross-culturally necessary wouldn’t make it an optional part of our culture. Andrew Sullivan is considerably more honest about homophobia in the autobiographical fragment with which he starts Virtually Normal, a book rather bizarrely oversold by its publishers. You’d better be pretty confident about the ballsiness of your product before ...”

“... memorial at Westminster Abbey on 14 February 1986. (Yes, St Valentine’s Day. The patron saint of bathos.) ‘Deliver me from all mine offences,’ the choir sang, doing Psalm 39, ‘and make me not a rebuke unto the foolish.’ Ted Hughes read the bit from Ecclesiasticus about now praising famous men. Where these orders of service used to be ...”

“... encountered what he called the ‘social hierarchy’ in which Burgess and Blunt moved so easily. Andrew Sinclair helps to cut the moles down to size. The real intellectual élite in inter-war Cambridge, he reminds us, were not the moles or their contemporaries (mostly from the arts faculties) in the Apostles but the brilliant scientists at the Cavendish ...”

“... I am speaking of the contest, of the highest importance for science, between Cuvier and Geoffroy Saint-Hilaire, which has come to an open rupture in the Académie.’ This expression of Goethe’s was so unexpected that I did not know what to say, and for some minutes felt my thoughts completely at a standstill. At stake, Goethe believed, was the soul of ...”

“... the official Marxism of the French Communist Party; its proclaimed affections were for Sade and Saint-Just; it called, with or without irony, for the restoration of the Terror as the only true revolutionary value. The third ‘group’ at Cosio was the London Psychogeographical Committee, a rather notional affair represented by its only known member, the ...”

“... with admiration, a sense of betrayal keeping constant guard over their earnestness. The author of Saint Morrissey, Mark Simpson, is an über-admirer in this style, and it follows, quite naturally, that he is also a writer with disciples of his own, having been described in reviews of his previous books as a ‘beauhunk’, ‘the gay antichrist’, and ‘the ...”

“... altar of General Patton or (briefly) Norman Schwarzkopf now views Ulysses S. Grant – ‘patron saint of the long, hard slog’ – as its role model. Bush has now bequeathed this long, hard slog to his successor. And though Obama has wasted no time in jettisoning some of the language used by the previous administration – banishing the phrase ‘global ...”

“... Necropolis.’ ‘Yes,’ I said. ‘The sign could say: “Up here, something did happen to Andrew O’Hagan. Like each of us, he wondered if it would happen. And it did.”’ Something happened to my second ever schoolteacher, Mrs Wallace. We saw her totally somethinged in her coffin under a huge crucifix of Jesus Christ, to whom, by the look of the ...”