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“... defying body and convention to ‘soar like an eagle’ in the way of the blessed inebriate in Richard Thompson’s song ‘God Loves a Drunk’ (‘His shouts and his curses they are just hymns and praises/To kick-start his mind now and then’)? Timothy Neat writes not in order to leave his late friend in a heap on the floor, least of all the floor of ...”

“... which I suppose was handy for the courts, still functioning across the road in the town hall with the whole complex – town hall, library, courts – an expression of the confidence of the city and its belief in the value of reading and education, and where you might end up if they were neglected. It’s a High ...”

“... architects to think there was anything for them in new Tube stations besides the ‘fit-out’. As Richard MacCormac, whose firm has designed the new Southwark Station, put it: ‘the engineers design the system, then the architects dress it up. Was it just a matter of deciding which tiles to put on the platform walls?’ When Paoletti started looking for ...”

“... This last fact is revealing. In the first televised presidential debates in 1960, John Kennedy and Richard Nixon argued for four hours. Since televised debating returned in 1976, 13 presidential and ten vice-presidential candidates have spent a further 39 and three-quarter hours standing at podiums, sitting at tables or prowling among studio audiences. Despite ...”

“... yet somehow distinctive, relatively easy to identify (Norman Foster, along with his former partner Richard Rogers, is English for Architecture). No wonder corporate and political leaders hire this stylish practice: there is a mirroring of self-images here, at once technocratic and innovative, that suits client and firm alike. ‘Foster’ offers an ...”

“... battle in which the main winners were advertising executives, Margaret Thatcher closed down County Hall. The GLC’s functions were privatised, and London was represented in government by a succession of ministers with no particular interest in the city. During the mid-1990s, New Labour announced its intention to devolve power from Whitehall and, once ...”

“... symphonies now occupy the dead centre of the repertory. This past season, in New York, Carnegie Hall put on the Ninth on a Sunday, the Third the following Thursday, and, about a week later, on successive evenings, Das Lied von der Erde and the First. One loud night in February, the Second and Fourth were done simultaneously, at Carnegie and at the ...”

“... copies of the New Statesman and a collective season ticket to the Promenade Concerts at Queen’s Hall. They read Proust and Spengler, Macaulay and Gibbon, Tom Paine and Cobbett, Hume and Herbert Spencer. They never missed a Harold Laski public lecture. They went in a solid phalanx to hear Shaw, Belloc and Chesterton debate at Kingsway ...”

“... at Harvard, in Paris, and with various firms, he opened his own office in 1962. Influenced by Richard Neutra, the Austrian emigré who also practised locally, Gehry gradually turned a Modernist idiom into a funky LA vernacular. He did so primarily in domestic architecture through an innovative use of cheap materials associated with commercial building ...”

“... had become an invaluable member of the athletics team and attracted the patronage of Sir Noel Hall, the Master of Brasenose, which college allowed Archer token university membership. Mantle writes: ‘He spoke to the principal [Hall] as he had done to Cobb, in a way that was both respectful and confiding, almost as if ...”

“... in the middle of a field.20 January. Collected by the New Yorker and taken to be photographed by Richard Avedon, now a grey-haired faun of 72 who says he’s bored with taking snapshots in the studio (this morning Isaiah Berlin and Stephen Spender) and wants to photograph me outside. ‘Outside’ means that eventually I find myself perched up a tree in Hyde ...”

“... in Paris, but it is still the most impressive and among the most magisterially consistent. Richard Goy and Robert Berger, in their respective accounts of the construction of the Cà d’Oro and of Louis XIV’s Louvre, remove ambiguities which hang around the word ‘built’. They ask who made decisions, who paid, and how much, and why each building ...”

“... currently in charge of the Labour Party. Ada Salter refused to fly the Union Jack from the town hall, preferring a red flag blazoned with local emblems; Alfred declared they were ‘out to abolish the working classes as such and create a classless society. That is what we mean by socialism.’ The Times declared him an extremist.The afterlives of the ...”

“... yellow sands’, in which a succession of voices discourse on the fairy painter and parricide Richard Dadd (odd that no one comments on the singular aptness of his surname). Dadd, having taken his father for the devil, went at him in Cobham Park with a spring-knife – a weapon more effective than Christy Mahon’s loy. Poor dad – or, if you like, poor ...”

“... The Reading Room of the British Museum is now completed, and if London had nothing but this hall of the blessed, scholars would make it well worth their while to make a pilgrimage here. All the sorrows of the outside would disappear in the mighty rotunda, and it is so quiet in this region of the eternal spirits that one can follow a thought into one’s inmost recesses ...”