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“... has gone horribly wrong, and the solace the authors find in the architecture of Caruso St John or Eric Parry does not make up for it. No guide to London’s architecture has ever been so successful. Regularly updated from top to bottom every decade or so since its first publication in 1983 it obviously fulfils a need. There is no shortage of guides to ...”

“... which led some to gravitate toward the fringes of American society both left and right. John Rambo, for his part, did both. In First Blood (1982), Sylvester Stallone’s character is a ‘half-German, half-Indian’ veteran, traumatised by the war, who arrives in a small town to pay his respects to a black comrade killed by exposure to Agent ...”

“... Trains guilty of a breach of the Health and Safety at Work Act in July 1999, Mr Justice Scott Baker said he thought this ‘an astonishing conclusion’. The driver involved in the Southall accident was travelling at over 100 mph, and passed the distance between the first warning signal and the red stop signal in less than 45 seconds. He may have been ...”

“... into Marxist discourse with Third World progressives.’ Wannabet? A key chapter by Robin Broad, John Cavanagh and Walden Bello on ‘Sustainable Development in the Nineties’ attacks capitalist development strategies in the Third World and details all manner of ecological disasters they have caused. Not many years ago this would have served as prologue to ...”

“... her life. Dogville is structured in chapters, like Breaking the Waves, but also has a narrator (John Hurt) who supplies a mocking commentary on the town and its hypocrisies. Grace is found by an aspiring young writer called Tom (Paul Bettany), who is engaged in an inquiry into Moral Rearmament. Tom believes that the people of Dogville have no sense of ...”

“... things: Of Machonachie, Paxton, Tickler, and Gloucester’s Stephens; Fray Bentos, Spiller and Baker, odds and evens Of trench food ...                                            (‘Laventie’) And of songs: ‘David of the White Rock’, the ‘Summer Song’ so soft, and that Beautiful tune to which roguish ...”

“... after forty years, but off the top of my head (current haircut modelled after the sleeve of Chet Baker & Crew, Pacific Records, 1956) wasn’t it ‘Existence precedes essence’? Or: ‘Man is condemned to be free’? Or (surely a contender for a TV quiz show clincher): ‘Hell is … other people!’? I fed the ‘famous dictum’ into Google and it was ...”

“... now. So it is that we learn that as an actor Shakespeare played Old Hamlet, Adam, Friar Laurence, John of Gaunt, Henry IV, Egeon and Duncan, but then again perhaps he didn’t, since all we have in support of this claim is a late rumour and some unverifiable computer analysis. Shakespeare’s will seems to confirm a well-established estrangement from not just ...”

“... auction, as expected, was the Jean Louis sheath dress, covered in tiny stones, worn by Marilyn at John Kennedy’s birthday tribute in 1962, when she sang ‘Happy Birthday’. This went for over a million dollars. The man who bought it (owner of a memorabilia shop called Ripley’s Believe It or Not) thought he’d got a great bargain. The Kennedy dress ...”

“... that the partisans had selfish, sectional aims. There’s something in both views.Via Rasella, as John Foot has observed, is seen both as a ‘heroic act of war’ and ‘a pointless and vanguardist terrorist attack’. Bentivegna belonged to the Gruppi di Azione Patriottica, which was dominated by communists and socialists (he was a Trotskyite). Many thought ...”

“... floating five ideas plausibly. Obama keeps a list of his achievements and – according to Peter Baker in a recent New York Times Magazine profile – judges himself to have accomplished 70 per cent of what he hoped in his first two years. Jay Gatsby, too, kept lists, and one may be reminded of Gatsby’s ‘Platonic conception of himself’. The unsettling ...”

“... furniture; a deep window ledge held a small number of books: The Highland Clearances by John Prebble, pamphlets on local flora, a field guide to birds, Gavin Maxwell’s Ring of Bright Water. After we’d unpacked, we went for a stroll over the salt marsh. The tide was out, leaving creeks and channels. A bridge spanned the river that ran, swollen ...”

“... surprise and intensely interesting. Among the good ones are ‘The Old House at Home’, about Old John McSorley and his son Old Bill, who founded and carried on McSorley’s Old Ale House in New York’s East Village; the already described ‘Mazie’ and ‘Lady Olga’; and ‘The Mohawks in High Steel’, which, along with much else, is one of the best ...”

“... caught any of Alan Bennett’s Westminster Abbey footage? Bennett, required to audition for the John Betjeman slot, couldn’t bring himself to deliver much more than formulaic world-weariness, a drone like a miraculously articulate David Hockney impersonator. Jonathan Meades does this schtick so much better, performs himself with lip-smacking ...”

“... themselves into trouble. Last year, Jo Shuter, the former head of Quintin Kynaston Academy in St John’s Wood, was banned from teaching after admitting to widespread misuse of public funds – using school money for taxis, phones and a great many flowers, plus £7000 for her 50th birthday party and £8269 for a boutique-hotel jolly for senior staff. The ...”