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“... is famous for two things: her intense screen beauty and her many marriages (eight of them, two to Richard Burton). But at least as central to her life were her close and enduring friendships with men, some gay (like Rock Hudson), others heterosexual (like Farrell). Sometimes, Farrell took her to the Polo Lounge in the Beverly Hills Hotel, where she had been ...”

“... probity with bronze and granite were becoming popular when, with a great piece of salesmanship, Richard Rogers persuaded Lloyd’s to accept a brilliant, unclubbable cousin of the Pompidou Centre for their headquarters. The sense of the passing of architectural time is particularly strong in London now. The Eighties boom found a city of ...”

“... a ‘provincial’ bore, there have been poets around for some time, such as Edwin Morgan and Roy Fisher, who give the lie to that. Home is no longer ‘so sad’. At home few people speak Proper English all the time. Home-based poetry may be in dialect, which is present in nearly all the writers considered here: but it may also fuel itself with a ...”

“... out-of-kilter book about that model. His standard texts appear to be Justin McCarthy and H.A.L. Fisher, historians whose reputations had faded when Mr James was a schoolboy under Sir Roger Fulford. He puts one in mind of those Sloane Rangers who, so it is said, keep to their A-level texts at university to avoid intellectual fatigue. Yet, as against ...”

“... solution to the Irish problem. From the start they had little patience with what Warren Fisher, Head of the Civil Service between the wars, described as the ‘blackmail and bluff (oddly enough called loyalty)’ consistently deployed by the then Northern Ireland Government. Fisher prescribed a dose of reality for ...”

“... University of Michigan in 2003, her complaint was of discrimination against white people. Abigail Fisher, the upper-middle-class daughter of a man who attended the very college that refused to admit her, and who thus belongs to a group that has no problem getting access to good colleges, has lodged exactly the same complaint, and her case is currently before ...”

“... Cities that are beautiful, safe and equitable are within our grasp.’ So says Richard Rogers at the end of this reworking of his Reith Lectures of 1995, and we must do our best to believe him. Suppose, however, that the lecturer had pronounced instead on another of the basic building-blocks of society – the family, for instance ...”

“... When Richard, Duke of York, laid claim to the English throne in 1460, he presented himself as a physician, sent to heal the ills of the kingdom. In partnership with his apothecaries, the faithful Commons, he would probe ‘the root and bottom of this long-festered canker’ and separate ‘the clean and pure stuff from the old, corrupt and putrefied dregs ...”

“... committee to examine NHS expenditure: the crucial brief was written by two young welfare radicals, Richard Titmuss and Brian Abel-Smith. He also set up the first committee to investigate the effects of smoking: both the Treasury and Lord Salisbury wanted to suppress its Report and Macleod, anxious to placate such powerful colleagues, chain-smoked his way ...”

“... appropriate agreement between personal pronouns and indefinites. The first to do so was Ann Fisher in her New Grammar, a widely used textbook originally published in 1745. ‘The Masculine Person answers to the general Name,’ Fisher explained, ‘which comprehends both Male and Female; as Any Person who knows what ...”

“... to class interest, or, more important, racial supremacy. If the thing is a genuine mystery, if, as Richard Lewontin has written, ‘we know nothing more about genetic causes of difference in social status and power today than was known to Galton,’ then the history of biological engineering, and genetics, is merely an aspect of the history of class or race or ...”

“... to his cost, was not his strong suit. Hamilton’s obituarists were not timid in their assessment: Richard Dawkins called him ‘a good candidate for the title of most distinguished Darwinian since Darwin’. His most important contribution was a Darwinian explanation of altruism, a problem over which Darwin himself admitted to having had sleepless ...”

“... industrial squalor and urban overcrowding persists in the minds of public and planners alike,’ Richard Rogers and Anne Power argue in Cities for a Small Country, ‘and fuels an almost obsessive desire for low-density, suburban homes.’ What happened, they ask, to ‘the English love of cities’? Should we blame the town planner Ebenezer Howard for the ...”

“... rid of them.’Consider the snail. ‘Snails are on the front line of extinction these days,’ Richard Taws writes, and it’s not just their stuff or their parents, but their existence as a species. Achatinella apexfulva, the Hawaiian tree snail, gave up the ghost on 1 January 2019. Maybe the loss of a few Fisher Price ...”

“... rear cattle in the evening, criticise after dinner and make love in between, without being hunter, fisher, herder, critic or lover. As ever, we are not told how. Nevertheless, simple, even simple-minded, and derivative though it is, Heath’s little book does develop in one direction that does not so far seem to have interested Foucault or anyone else who has ...”