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“... Frenchness overrode blackness: Paris, adopted home of James Baldwin, Josephine Baker and Richard Wright, was a paradise compared to Jim Crow Alabama. But when Davis went there, the summer after Kennedy wowed the Elysée, she saw ‘racist slogans scratched on the walls of the city threatening death to the Algerians’: they didn’t have it in for her ...”

“... to public officials could be justified if there was ‘overwhelming public interest’. Her QC, Jonathan Laidlaw, took her through each story, asking whether, had she known the source was a public official, she would have sanctioned payment. It was a masterstroke: the exercise stressed which stories were in the public interest and which weren’t, but the ...”

“... Jonathan Meades, for the last thirty years Britain’s most consistently surprising and informative writer on the built environment, has finally published a book on the subject. A volume did appear in 1988 – English Extremists, written with Deyan Sudjic and Peter Cook, celebrating the postmodern architects Campbell Zogolovitch Wilson Gough – but since then his medium has been television ...”

“... been a different sort of politician, but that he might not really be a politician at all. When Jonathan Freedland interviewed him recently for the Guardian, he started by asking: ‘Are you a writer who became a politician, rather than a politician who’s done some writing?’ ‘Great question,’ Obama replied.What else might he have been? A law ...”

“... like Wordsworth’s idiot boy (his mother’s ‘best delight’), or tended by the parish. As Jonathan Andrews shows here in a rich archival trawl, the old Poor Law often dribbled out shillings to nurses (mainly but not exclusively female) to tend those unable to dress, clean or feed themselves. Such findings hardly square with Foucault’s vision of a ...”

“... moment in 1914 when he acquired a ‘sentimental attitude’ towards the poor in Budapest; Richard Wright remembering the profound sense of ‘kinship between the sufferings of the Negro and the sufferings of other people’ that stirred within him when he at tended a John Reed Club in Chicago in the Twenties; and Stephen Spender speaking about being ‘moved ...”

“... Its improbable neighbour was Robert van ’t Hoff, a member of De Stijl and author of Lloyd Wright inspired villas near Utrecht, of Augustus John’s studio in Mallord Street SW3 and, after he’d eschewed modernism, of a retrophile Arts and Craftsism. Nairn, perhaps second-guessing Pevsner, senior partner in the first edition of Buildings of ...”

“... articulate much of what Auden called ‘nuance and scruple’, but then it never set out to. As Jonathan Raban once said, Carey was ‘the hatchetman’s hatchetman’. In his autobiography Carey recalls his early scholarly tasks of editing Milton and of compiling a student anthology of critical essays about Andrew Marvell, experiences that awoke him to the ...”

“... building is, as Adolf Loos once had it, a crime. (People often say Roark was based on Frank Lloyd Wright, but there are no significant similarities. Rand and Wright did meet, though: she visited Taliesin and commissioned designs for a house, never to be built.) The thesis is an extreme version of the Modernist ...”

“... density more or less lightly. It favours stories about gangland hitmen (Brian ‘The Milkman’ Wright, ‘during his drug-dealing days he always delivered’; John ‘Goldfinger’ Palmer, once ‘one of Britain’s richest men, owning a fleet of private planes, helicopters, boats and cars’), and every few pages there’s a soap star in her ...”

“... essay ‘On Intellectual Craftsmanship’, appended to his The Sociological Imagination (1959), C. Wright Mills reassuringly remarks that ‘the way in which these categories change, some being dropped and others being added, is an index of your intellectual progress … As you rearrange a filing system, you often find that you are, as it were, loosening your ...”

“... would be ‘honest thief-takers’, not the kind in The Beggar’s Opera, or in Fielding’s novel Jonathan Wild, who colluded with criminals until it became expedient to hand them over to justice. In the early years of the runners some worked as prison turnkeys; others had unexpected former careers: one was an ex-pickpocket, and one a highwayman who had ...”

“... author, the other by the present director general, make clear how problematic this tension was. Jonathan Evans (the DG) spells out his ‘public interest’ case for suppressing a certain amount of material; Andrew tells us of the ‘vigour’ with which he contested many of these (and other departments’) proscriptions, at least one of which – relating ...”

“... In 1987, BT’s phone box monopoly ended. So began the conversion memorably described by Patrick Wright in A Journey through Ruins (1991), of the only remaining ‘public’ element of a now otherwise privately owned service into a (privately owned) heritage industry. Boxes began to come in different shapes and sizes. Respectable neighbourhoods could hope ...”

“... to the attention of the editors at Partisan Review, who began publishing her criticism: Richard Wright, Faulkner, Hart Crane, the Goncourts – Hardwick could turn her hand to almost anything. When Philip Rahv met her, he was struck by her gumption. He asked her what she thought of Diana Trilling: ‘Not much.’ ‘I weighed about ten pounds ...”