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“... thanks largely to the posthumous revelations about the Belgian-American literary theorist Paul de Man. But what about the ordinary people of the Low Countries? Hugo Claus’s The Sorrow of Belgium, a novel first published in Holland in 1983, presents a world in which collaboration with the Nazis is made to seem as inevitable as breathing. The ...”

“... minister for much of the reign, William Cecil, Lord Burghley, such a favourite? In this volume, Paul Hammer distinguishes his position from that of a courtier-favourite such as, above all, Robert Devereux, Earl of Essex, but for Brockliss, Burghley fits the category of ‘minister-favourite’, which, so far as he is concerned, is what this book is all ...”

“... personality we know very little, is ranked among the greatest of theologians, next only to St Paul and St Augustine. Of his publications, the centrepiece is the dauntingly hefty Summa Theologiae. In its dry, brisk, low-key manner, this formidable compendium of theology, metaphysics, ethics and psychology ranges from Thomas’s celebrated demonstrations of ...”

“... patrons. Scipione Borghese, Bernini’s first great supporter and client, persuaded his uncle Pope Paul V to make his lover Stefano Pignatelli a cardinal; and Antonio Barberini, Pope Urban VIII’s notorious nephew, was made a cardinal at the age of twenty, to howls of protest, and proceeded to populate the family palace – now famous for its collection of ...”

“... is time?’ St Augustine wondered. ‘Provided that no one asks me, I know.’ Gillian Adler and Paul Strohm explore the many answers proposed by writers, artists and visionaries in the Middle Ages. ‘Medieval people’, they write, were ‘more keenly aware of simultaneous and contending temporalities than we are, and more skilled at entertaining a wider ...”

“... as nearly as humans can to the processes of nature itself. If you look at the photographs by Paul van Vlissingen taken monthly from one August to the next at Rudha Cailleach, or Witches’ Point, on the north shore of Loch Maree, you find you’re watching a mobile image, pregnant in each of its 13 stages, the more so because it alters so much as the ...”

“... is proven: Renault uses its centre in Swindon (1980-82), with its yellow exoskeleton of piers, cables and canopies, as the backdrop for its UK adverts, and the Financial Times has adopted the Commerzbank Headquarters in Frankfurt (1991-97), a towering wedge in white and greys, as its emblem of the city. In this business of architecture as ...”

“... and the Second World War.’There​ was no sign of Icke when I arrived in Trafalgar Square. Piers Corbyn, whose brother, the former Labour leader, can’t be held responsible for him, was speaking. Piers Corbyn is a physicist and one-time commercial meteorologist who believes that man-made climate change is a ...”

“... his interiors are difficult to decipher from his exteriors and vice versa, whether they are read structurally as with the Modernist duck, or ornamentally as with the Post-Modern shed. This disconnection between inside and outside can be beguiling, as it is in his Vitra International Headquarters (1988-94, in Switzerland) or his EMR Communications and ...”

“... are watched by more than 12 million people every week, and three-quarters of UK adults listen to, read or watch its news in some form. It claims to reach 91 per cent of the population at least once a week – one of its chief defences as a public broadcaster with an income of £4.9 billion a year. The BBC World Service is responsible for projecting the ...”

“... a change from brawling over toilet rolls.26 March. Around six Nick Hytner rings, highly excited. Piers Wenger (controller of BBC drama) has just rung him saying that though current restrictions make mounting any TV programmes difficult, he thinks it may be possible to do a new version of the Talking Heads monologues from 1988. Nick is ringing me ...”

“... Jarman made a note in his diary in April 1989: ‘Since autumn: Terry, Robert, David, Ken, Paul, Howard. All the brightest and best trampled to death – surely even the Great War brought no more loss into one life in just 12 months, and all this as we made love not war.’ In March 1992: ‘We talked of the people who died of Aids this week.’ ‘To ...”

“... down, never mind wind down. Brown harks back to the age when prime ministers had the leisure to read poetry (Disraeli and Gladstone), write love letters (Asquith) or take morning drinks and afternoon naps (Churchill). I imagine there are lawyers, doctors, accountants, even writers, who feel the same sense of nostalgia for a rhythm of life that’s never ...”

“... accommodation. People built sanitariums and spa hotels, they planted palm trees and erected iron piers, as if one could promenade from restoration to decline, from cheerfulness to death, without it seeming so dark or sordid a journey. The hotels were white. ‘They come here to die,’ wrote the man who laid out the gardens by the pier at Bournemouth. ‘Let ...”

“... of childbearing age.In 1968, The Population Bomb, a bestseller written by the Stanford professor Paul Ehrlich and his (uncredited) wife, Anne, predicted that there would soon not be enough food to support the human population and that famines in the 1970s would kill hundreds of millions. The only way to prevent this, they said, was strict birth control ...”