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“... to creature comforts. I wondered, for instance, if the Russians had got round to mineral water. John Sturrock reassured me. ‘Haven’t you heard of Perrierstroika?’ The Writers’ Union is a pleasant one-storeyed 19th-century building set round a leafy courtyard and currently being refurbished against Mr Reagan’s visit. He is to have lunch here. We ...”

“... power, and represented the cutting edge of technology. Their load was carried by tightly spaced steel columns girding their perimeter, braced laterally by each floor deck. The destruction by explosion and fire of columns and floors on several storeys therefore transferred excessive loads to the remaining columns. As these loads became unsustainable, one ...”

“... Few books have done as much to reveal the latent liberalism of the Unionist tradition as John Bew’s The Glory of Being Britons: Civic Unionism in 19th-Century Belfast (2009). Bew challenged the prevalent notion that Unionism was at best a reflex response to Irish nationalism and at worst mere anti-Catholic prejudice. Rather, Bew showed that one of ...”

“... brown and blue containers: HAMBURG SÜD, HANJIN, MOL. Like a monumental Paul Klee hammered out in steel. In Thatcher’s day it seemed a ground-level manifestation of what I took to be her vision of enterprise: deranged scams, small businesses wiped out. And the ghosts of the unions exorcised along with the industries in which they once played a significant ...”

“... with an ANC-ruled South Africa, back within the Commonwealth. If the book has a hero it is Sir John Maud, the British high commissioner who advised in 1960 that since a black government must come to power one day, Britain must ‘keep faith’ with the black majority, while at the same time not antagonising the National Party government to no good ...”

“... a wider sense of possibility. ‘Booms in photography, Sunday film and theatre clubs, Surrealism, steel furniture, faintly obscure poetry’ were among the things Rose Macaulay singled out as characterising the ‘decorative, intelligent, extravagant’ 1920s. In 1919 the Women’s Engineering Society was founded and Nancy Astor became the first female MP to ...”

“... nut processing factory where she worked. It was a good job, clean and fairly light compared to the steel mill where I’d been employed the previous summer and, like all food-related work, it had its perks. My favourite nuts were almonds, which I would send through the fryer in illicit batches, mostly for personal consumption, and it didn’t hurt, during the ...”

“... the end came she was desperately sorry to be leaving him. Of the younger men coming to the fore, John Gollan, Pollitt’s successor – though the latter continued to dominate, she believes – was a likeable character; and George Matthews (still active today) seemed, as he did to everyone, a man full of ‘earnest honesty’. The Party set up in 1920 was ...”

“... Most policemen would see this as something a good defence solicitor determined to show his steel might do: it would have seemed unusual in a lawyer appointed to liaise with them. In matters such as these, Khan’s appointment showed up the extreme inflexibility of the police, most of whom take a very simplistic view of members of the legal ...”

“... wall while in the middle of the floor, humped in silence, is Robert Morris’s big low cage of a steel sculpture of 1967 and to either side whitish paintings by Robert Ryman and Agnes Martin. No self-respecting museum would present a combination which was so insouciant art-historically, but it does look very good. The second room is Gallery 12 ...”

“... Nearby was Portman Square, another highly-sought rectangle, the contractor for which was John Elwes, scion of a family of congenital and pathological misers, himself one of the London rich. For a long period these proud squares stood incongruously on the edge of open country, highwayman-haunted. There was much to be said for a mansion in Grosvenor ...”

“... or overpower the cabin crew with a box marked ‘Slaughter Surgical Supplies’ full of stainless steel oddities they’d never seen before. When we got to the funeral home they had taken him to, taken his body to, the undertaker asked us if we were sure we wanted to do this – our own father after all? – he’d be happy to call in one of his embalmers. We ...”

“... forward’ to it. Her moment came in Liverpool in January 1910 when a prison doctor put a steel gag in her mouth, inserted a long rubber tube and poured a vile mixture of ‘milk, gruel, eggs, brandy, sugar and beef tea’ through it – to add insult to injury she was vegetarian. She felt she was suffocating, and kept being sick until the tube was ...”

“... Eamonn O Ciardha and Micheál O Siochrú makes clear. From Giraldus Cambrensis to the chronicler John of Fordun, medieval commentators from Britain had demonised the Gaels for their barbarous ways. Such sentiments still persist in the expected quarters. Ian Paisley claimed in the early 1980s that the forebears of the good Protestant folk of Ulster had ‘cut ...”

“... Congress barely peeped as costs soared – though there were a few notable holdouts, like Senator John McCain, who called it ‘a scandal and a tragedy’. McCain is a leading representative of a dissident American military tradition that prefers light and agile to massive and lumbering, but it may not be insignificant that his home state, Arizona, is one of ...”