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“... Americans against German cities. Americans come last chronologically, and also in intent, for as Richard Overy explains succinctly and well, the US saw the bombing of cities as a last resort and not the very first aim, as it was for Bomber Command. However, from Appendix 2 of the Hamburg police president’s report, which isn’t reproduced in the official ...”

“... the US as a sinister maritime republic with an all-powerful navy (Ahab is a fighting Quaker like Richard Nixon), Marvell hints at what the future may hold for a Commonwealth that has no institutional continuity. The theme of wounded male narcissism – the mower on a hot day mown, self-injured – may be one way of giving imaginative shape to what it feels ...”

“... a quotation labouring to attain a modicum of reality. Not so much a dry David Hockney splash as Richard Wilson’s site-specific installation 20:50: his tank of sump oil, miraculously transubstantiated into this brilliant new substance, a liquid thicker than jelly but lighter than air. A seductive mosaic carpet across which you cannot walk without ...”

“... occupation and living wage (a black-humoured task dreamt up for my convalescence by the well-named Richard Gott) arrived 22 years late: in 1968 I sent a memorandum to the then editor proposing a daily warts-and-all profile of a man or woman lately dead – in other words, a Not-the-Times obituary column. Now it is universally agreed in the four serious dailies ...”

“... the measured judgment of Lord Dacre? Was it an impish vulgarisation ventured by Professor Norman Stone? Well, no, it was Nicholas Ridley, of course, nailing back another fag, the better to concentrate his thoughts for the readers of the Spectator. His level of analysis, however, for all the difference of tone, is on the same wavelength as that of Powell’s ...”

“... his notes: ‘And are you still drinking two bottles of wine a day?’ Some of the best things in Richard Klein’s brilliant, wayward book Eat Fat* are about the way in which the medical profession rushes after certain facts and conclusions while phlegmatically ignoring others. The medical received wisdom which particularly gets his goat is to do with the ...”

“... and browse. By 3500 BC, Neolithic people were clearing large areas to make room for their sacred stone circles – and the estimated numbers of their settlements, fields and tracks are constantly being raised. Coates faults the doyen of landscape historians, W.G. Hoskins, for writing in 1955 that ‘vast areas’ of England survived ‘in their natural ...”

“... calls ‘the number one id’. Garrigan’s new master is six foot six inches tall and weighs 20 stone. He is in the rudest of health. There is no truth, Garrigan says, in the popular rumour – popular in the West, anyway – that Amin is syphilitic. This is the explanation that the white world contrived for his grandiloquence, his grandiosity: that these ...”

“... in gung-ho exercises. A design for the Canadian Estate at Bulford. Two birds with one stone: the A303 should be diverted north just west of Parkhouse crossroads (the site of the Battle of the Beanfield in 1985, when police from Wiltshire and five adjacent sties plus troops in porcine disguise ambushed and assaulted New Age travellers en route to ...”

“... out – the exact path that a given load was taking through the network of assembled steel and stone. It was certain that the loads, dead and live, were being resisted. As they are today and will be tomorrow. Until they’re not. Another story Galdi liked to tell involved the design of a car park. He was once asked to determine the total load on such a ...”

“... been lost to the dead hand of over-zealous interpretation and expensive presentation. In 1855, Richard Deakin, a Victorian botanist, published a volume devoted to the species he found growing on and around the Colosseum, a six-acre site which supported 420 different plants. Deakin is one of Woodward’s many unsung heroes. The conjunction of nature and ...”

“... entangled (Partridge’s text is addressed not only to ‘Good Huswives’ but also to Richard Wistow, assistant to the Company of Barbers and Surgeons). According to Galenic humoural theory, health was a matter of balancing the black bile, yellow bile, blood and phlegm that swam through the body, and food was a crucial means of establishing this ...”

“... essay on ‘Jewishness in Music’ is one from whom he stole not just a motif but the foundation-stone of the Ring. To which must be added the foundation-stone of Parsifal (the ‘Dresden Amen’), not to mention debts in the overture to the early opera Die Feen (evoking that to A Midsummer Night’s Dream) and the ...”

“... close to a recitation of a catechism, simply asking, for example, ‘how it can be that a stone, a plant, a star, can take on the burden of being.’ But where all his powers were concentrated, Agee could build to more sustained recognitions; as in the intense rendering of the plain faces of a man and a woman: The young man’s eyes had the opal ...”

“... to think’. He is alluding to McCarthyism and the Cold War. When another radical journalist, I.F. Stone, listened to Eisenhower’s inaugural address, what he heard behind its rhetoric of freedom was the drumbeat of war (although Eisenhower was reluctant to send troops to the region, the build-up to Vietnam would start on his watch). ...”