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“... be.On a Monday in late August 1956, somewhere around two hundred of us waited in the assembly hall of Dunfermline High School, wondering what would come next. We had stood to sing the day’s hymn and sat bent to mutter the Lord’s Prayer – the Scottish version, debts and debtors rather than the sibilant trespasses and trespass – and then watched as ...”

“... in the grate and a smelly tallow candle to hold back the night. Thomas Rowlandson, ‘Vaux-Hall’ (c.1784). For the price of a ticket, one could enjoy musical performances and refreshments al fresco, or simply see and be seen. Princes rubbed shoulders with prostitutes, duchesses with doctors’ daughters: the social mix was a large part of the ...”

“... suggest such a thing?) However, there is a certain family resemblance between the languid village hall in Florida designed by Krier and the replanned Italian town of Alessandria also featured in his book. ‘Modern is chronology, while modernist is ideology,’ Krier points out, to demonstrate that he isn’t a hopeless reactionary; he is perfectly ready to ...”

“... American followed a group of anti-Civil Rights protesters onto the plaza outside Boston’s City Hall. His picture shows Joseph Rakes, a white teenager, wielding Old Glory as a spear, lunging forward as if he were about to impale Theodore Landsmark, a well-dressed black attorney who’d had the misfortune to cross paths with the protesters. As Landsmark ...”

“... missile soon after Trump’s inauguration. The need for a change of tack should be clear. James Clapper, Obama’s director of National Intelligence, has admitted that Washington’s goal of pressing North Korea to give up its nuclear programme is ‘probably a lost cause’, and that ‘significant inducements’ will be required to deal with the ...”

“... of his father in A House for Mr Biswas, in which Biswas daydreams while reading the novels of Hall Caine and Marie Corelli, and tries to use the word ‘bower’ because he found it in Wordsworth (by way of the Royal Reader). The sadness clouding that novel is that one is always oneself even when one does not know it; freedom is always qualified, a shout ...”

“... making. In an address to the Royal Television Society in 2018, the current director-general, Tony Hall, made clear that he viewed the ‘big shift’ to online and on-demand consumption as the corporation’s most significant challenge, and the one on which it would be judged. He also discussed two other problems: the need for more money to sustain the ...”

“... in 1970s and 1980s Yorkshire that first made Peace’s name. This is a writer who compares St James’s Hospital in Leeds to Dachau. I don’t suppose the now closed Stanley Royd Mental Hospital in Wakefield was a merry place in 1980, but was it really, as Peace described it in Red Riding, ‘an Auschwitz, a Belsen’? Red Riding was published in four ...”

“... Donegal and Cavan – in the Irish Republic. The colonial Plantation of Ulster in the reign of James VI and I covered six counties, but not those of today’s Northern Ireland. Ironically, the counties which became the redoubt of British Protestant settlement – Antrim and Down – were not technically part of the Plantation, which instead encompassed ...”

“... on Banbury Road in Oxford, said to have been installed by the Royal Mail to ease the labours of James Murray at the helm of the Oxford English Dictionary. With a magnificent incuriosity, I never thought to wonder at the strangeness of a post box positioned to enable a dictionary – it was simply where I deposited weekly letters to my friend Marian, who ...”

“...  Henry James​ ’s novel The Princess Casamassima, which dramatises the world of stray revolutionaries in London in the 1880s, depends on energy coming from opposites. The novel’s protagonist, Hyacinth Robinson, appreciates beauty and feels excluded from the world of privilege around him. He lives an interior life ...”

“... wheel), he was allowed on his way. This ‘Amateur Casual’, who was in reality the journalist James Greenwood, then went home for a second, more restorative, hot bath. On 12 January, the first of three articles detailing his experience appeared in the Pall Mall Gazette under the title ‘A Night in a Workhouse’. Seth Koven opens his rich and absorbing ...”

“... drawing by Larry Rivers, freeze him in a pose of brooding nobility, small and tough like Keats. (James Schuyler mourned: ‘even your lines have/a broken nose,’ a kind of translation of Leigh Hunt’s description of his doomed friend – ‘He had a face in which energy and sensibility were remarkably mixed up.’) ‘Frank’ has become shorthand for ...”

“... when I was young. It was marvellous to see the long cord, which stretched from the door along the hall, moving so calmly while the sprung bell at its end convulsed. It seemed so easy to request something: a simple pulling of this wire, and people were summoned, came running. I opened the door; there was the familiar gloom and heaviness of wood, the sparse ...”

“... and statues of the Fonte Gaia, the municipal fountain that originally stood opposite the town hall in Siena. Although neither San Petronio nor the Fonte Gaia reflects much interest in the antique Roman architecture, ornament and figure style that so absorbed leading Florentine sculptors at the time, the tomb chest on which the effigy of Ilaria lies is ...”