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“... In ‘The Vandalised Telephone Box’, Wright describes the campaign to save the old red Gilbert Scott kiosk: a campaign which started from immaculately right-wing, anti-bureaucratic sentiments but ended in the discovery that the real heritage here was a public telephone service which served – rather than a privatised monopoly which lied and postured as ...”

“... Britain by William Klein examines some of the modifications. The picture is further modified by Michael Mendle’s searching essay on the constitutional programme of Charles I’s Parliamentary opponents in 1641-2. In the emergency created by royal mismanagement, Mendle argues, MPs were concerned less to assert legislative rights than to seize executive ...”

“... is well summed up in a conversation about the Supergun with the very right-wing junior minister Michael Fallon. Fallon’s view was that Britain ‘should be making them – the Superguns – and selling them to everyone’. ‘For nearly two years,’ Clark reveals, ‘the FCO section of Cabinet minutes was a long moan about how the Iraqi army was on its ...”

“... beautiful, quite unlike any previous art. Other St Martin’s sculptors included Phillip King, Tim Scott and William Tucker, all innovative artists who became tutors at St Martin’s immediately after completing their own studies. Thenceforward there was a line of sculptors at St Martins who changed, even further, the concept of what sculpture might be. Among ...”

“... can be a gold mine and, as Campbell notes, for all their limitations, official inquiries like the Scott Inquiry into the Matrix Churchill affair tell us a great deal about British government in general and Thatcher’s government in particular. ‘Witnesses’ – friends, colleagues, enemies – are now readier to speak frankly than they once were. Campbell ...”

“... of his prolific (hetero)sexual adventures: he had, says a more up-to-date historian than Rowse, Michael MacDonald, ‘a mesmerising personality and the sexual appetite of a goat’, and studded his diary with his ‘haleking’, as he put it, with an A to Z of his women, and with planning or avoiding such occasions as his consultation of the stars ...”

“... pink flesh, so not as nice. This is our annual holiday, and as usual I set off in the boat with Michael, Niall, Arvin and Shaska to camp on Iniskeel. We land on the little strand, walk round the island, where we startle a big bouncy hare, then we pitch the tent, collect driftwood and cook over the fire. Later, when it’s dark, we toast marshmallows over ...”

“... Abbey, rising above the Solent like a displaced Malian mosque; and at Battersea: Giles Gilbert Scott’s immense power station, fought over for decades, not least by Stamp, was one of the great tokens of its age. Its twin, downriver at Bankside, was, of course, also saved. The Guinness Brewery at Park Royal was vandalised by Diageo with the sanction of the ...”

“... I do not ask the subsidiary question about why then he doesn’t just walk on the ground. Paul Scott Makela galvanises and alarms the audience on the final morning with a viewing of the video he designed for Michael Jackson’s ‘Scream’, the song Jackson released after the child abuse allegations fell away. Makela ...”

“... of those with Christian backgrounds who remain uncertain of New Labour’s merits, such as Michael Meacher, an Anglican and ex-Bennite, or the Old Labour heirs to Eric Heffer, a staunch Anglo-Catholic, or Tony Benn, an agnostic who nonetheless argues that ‘the moral roots of socialism lie in religion’ and that ‘political agitation is groundless ...”

“... in Limbo. His image was enshrined, like those of Robin Hood, Louis XI and Rob Roy, by Sir Walter Scott. In the 20th century, he has inspired that most typical of modern accolades, the debunking biography. Newby’s book – for the general reader, it appears – follows hard (though for the most part independently) on the remorselessly scholarly study by ...”

“... Tarazona-Sevillano gives an authoritative account of Sendero’s structure and organisation. Michael Smith provides an assessment of its urban strategy that will do little to cheer the Peruvian authorities. Smith reveals that by mid-1990, Sendero had secured its beachhead in Lima and developed a sophisticated strategy to mobilise the support of ...”

“... is a tantalising suspicion of bitterness when the wine hits the top of the palate.’ Christie’s Michael Broadbent recently recalled the heyday of this style: I do like a bit of pure poetry, my favourite author being the late and great André Simon. At the end of a lunch at the Hind’s Head in Bray . . . his host asked Simon for his first reaction to the ...”

“... quartier as the basis of urban planning in Europe; on the other side were Robert Venturi, Denise Scott Brown and Steven Izenour, who embraced the commercial strip (‘billboards are almost all right,’ they proclaimed in 1972 in Learning from Las Vegas, a manifesto to which Delirious New York is an indirect riposte). Koolhaas could reject the reactionary ...”

“... is surprising. Balmoral has always been a byword for biscuit-tin tartanry. The novelist George Scott-Moncrieff, hardly a radical, described ‘the deadening slime of Balmorality’ as ‘a glutinous compound of hypocrisy, false sentiment, industrialism, ugliness and clammy pseudo-Calvinism’. I admire these descriptors, but I’m not sure that the ...”