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“... forms and his own arcane system of geometry, he was aided by mentors and patrons for whom he could do little wrong, despite his often dismissive attitude to both budget and brief. Country houses made Lutyens’s name, and his workload and assiduity caused considerable jealousy among his peers, but he wanted to be acclaimed as an architect of public ...”

“... on the defeat of the British army in South Africa. He held an anti-war meeting in Birmingham Town Hall, the heartland of Chamberlain’s political fief, and insisted that it go ahead when everyone from the chief constable down pleaded with him to cancel it. The result was the virtual sack of the town hall by a Union ...”

“... Dellums, Oakland’s septuagenarian mayor, addressed a crowd of protesters on the steps of City Hall. Dellums, immediately recognisable by his sculptured Afro – which, over the decades, has gone from jet black to snow white – looked shattered, dejected and defenceless. In earlier decades the mayor would have been standing alongside the ...”

“... worked on the assumption that anyone who was paid by someone else couldn’t help but do their employer’s bidding. The poor were apparently not ‘so chary of their soales health’ as substantial people whose oaths were unquestionable. Wages paid in kind – normal in a credit economy – caused more problems for those who had to labour for ...”

“... the school and under the Forth’, their fathers mined, then decorated the art rooms and the hall with pictures of swarming prehistoric life. A mother came to complain that her son had ‘done no work’ for a fortnight, he had been ‘taking encyclopedias home and reading them to all hours’ instead of doing ‘the kind of work that will help him to be ...”

“... self-important, fussy, but sensitive to beauty, romance and alien cultures – who is uppermost in David Gilmour’s splendid new biography. Gilmour punctures the myth of the insufferably arrogant and despotically ‘un-English’ Curzon perpetuated by society gossip and by the hostile accounts of the Beaverbrook circle. Attendants at his Indian court did not ...”

“... thereby greatly weakened. The sources of Thomson’s style are well documented by Charles McKean, David Walker and David Watkin. It is clear that he looked closely at the works of the vigorous school of northern Classicism, and he admitted to having certain favourites. In an 1866 pamphlet attacking Scott’s Gothic designs ...”

“... insistence on the working-class share of this growth. Is there a ladder of green awareness? Do we move on from supporting the Royal Society for the Protection of Birds, or the Society for the Protection of Rural England, to an understanding of the broader concerns these particular enthusiasms reflect? Is saving the whales inextricably tied up with ...”

“... in a family follows the departure of a particularly tiresome and exacting house guest. Elizabeth David herself – a veteran by marriage of wartime Cairo and pre-Independence Delhi – advised her readers thirty years ago: ‘Devote all the time and resources at your disposal to the building up of a fine kitchen. It will be, as it should be, the most ...”

“... ideas and movements is that these conflicts must take priority over the internal conflict, to do with wages and the distribution of national production. Indeed Bahro returns the charge often made against ecological or disarmament or feminist campaigns by saying that ‘if there is anything today that really does deserve the label of a single-issue ...”

“... of honour was Field Marshal Sir Henry Wilson, who unveiled a memorial in the station’s booking hall. It was marble, seven metres high and eight metres wide, and recorded the names of the 1220 men who had sacrificed their lives ‘in response to the call of their King and Country’. At six foot four, Wilson was an imposing figure. In 1886, on imperial ...”

“... to a couple of questions that were not new then and are with us still: what sort of an army do we need, and how do we regard and use the one we’ve got? To these questions, there are two conventional approaches. The more familiar and tractable appears under the heading of civil-military relations. Of greater social ...”

“... or simply informative they were generally more stoical than bellicose and often humorous. David Welch’s account is based on the Central Office of Information archive in the British Library, with occasional excursions beyond it, and he considers a wide range of material. It was in the summer of 1939, when war seemed inevitable, that a propaganda ...”

“... The registrar​ at Chelsea Town Hall on the King’s Road said that anything I told him would be assumed to be true: a notice on the desk next to his computer monitor explained the dangers of perjuring yourself. Then we began to go through the details of the death certificate. Name: Hugh Swynnerton Thomas. Date of death: 7 May 2017 ...”

“... has reconstructed is only a ‘family romance’, an operetta played out on her own toy stage. And David Lodge’s heroine complains that she is ‘getting dragged into a classic realist text, full of causality and morality. How can I get out of it?’ Trust the contemporary novelist for that, we might think – though, for Lodge’s characters, it’s a close ...”