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“... the antecedents of Webb’s Red House in the work of Butterfield and Pugin and indeed in John Nash, who might claim, if any one architect could, to have invented the architecture Muthesius so admired. But to the Edwardians Nash was still despicable as a stucco-peddling Neoclassicist, his houses ‘cheerless’ and ‘rectangular’. It was to the ...”

“... a good idea of the visual drama Clark relished. His opening words would be delivered in a darkened hall: ‘Roots and bulbs, pulled up into the light, give us for a moment the feeling of shame … They have the formless character of life which has been both protected and oppressed.’ Then the slide: a detail of nude figures in Rogier van der Weyden’s Last ...”

“... His first piece, for piano, was nine bars long, most of it a quote from a music-hall song called ‘Ma Normandie’. He seems to have found the sounds of the cafés and nightclubs more alluring than the classical tradition, and a ‘Fantaisie-Valse’ and a ‘Valse-Ballet’ followed.By the mid 1880s Satie was excelling at the vie de ...”

“... The nice thing about John Buchan is that he was on the side of books. He thought, it is true, that he ought to have been a Guardian, shaping the Empire, or dominating Cabinets, or, at worst, ‘a power behind the throne’. However, after his spell in Milner’s ‘Kindergarten’, the nation didn’t seem to want him in the Guardian line, so he did the next best thing and became an entertainer ...”

“... a passing resemblance to a small eastern deity, but even so it’s something of a lurch from this hall full of serene statuary, including the head of a 13th-century Buddha carved from sandstone, to a Scarfe cartoon of Harold Wilson with his lolling tongue in close proximity to Lyndon Johnson’s bottom (‘Vietnam: Wilson right behind Johnson’, 30 April ...”

“... he settled in London in 1889, and assimilated the rhythms and the fatalistic bravado of music-hall songs, that he began writing poems which claim to represent, to articulate common experiences. It is possible to admire Professor Rutherford’s scholarship, and still wonder why this book has been published. We now have a better edition of poems which will ...”

“... on Broadway and in movies. After her death in 1937, a memorial concert was held at Carnegie Hall. But Smith’s country cousins – ‘walking musicians’ – were lucky if they got recorded at all. ‘They were the offside,’ the Mississippi talent scout H.C. Speir said. ‘They never was known … to anybody.’By the time record companies got round ...”

“... in their name. Before the age of microphones, Bryan’s voice reached every cranny of the great hall as his speech boomed into its grand finale. ‘We will answer their demand for a gold standard by saying to them: you shall not press down upon the brow of labour this crown of thorns.’ Bryan grabbed at his temples and buckled his knees under the agony of ...”

“... he would invent ridiculous sources for it – a delicatessen, a Pullman railroad car, a Tammany Hall club – while in his stories and poems he would always inflict on his leading character, who was always himself, a name exotic or absurd, half old-time Jewish and half Hollywood – Shenandoah Fish, Hershey Green, Cornelius Schmidt. In his best verse ...”

“... the hardshell godmother of punk was without honour in her own country. She simply wasn’t there. John Lydon (formerly Rotten) was up on the hoardings, three layers back, advertising butter. Thatcher was a historic footnote in a culture that had abolished history. Or a tethered spectre in the form of a flapping black crow. Determined to squeeze a few last ...”

“... copies of the New Statesman and a collective season ticket to the Promenade Concerts at Queen’s Hall. They read Proust and Spengler, Macaulay and Gibbon, Tom Paine and Cobbett, Hume and Herbert Spencer. They never missed a Harold Laski public lecture. They went in a solid phalanx to hear Shaw, Belloc and Chesterton debate at Kingsway ...”

“... history. Part of that history can be traced back to the first historian of London to be published. John Stow arranged his pioneering Survey on a topographical system, ward by ward, conducting the reader on a perambulation of the city, providing him with much historical, architectural and biographical information and pausing here and there, as our latterday ...”

“... which has failed the Lawrences – it is life itself. This is the private story. Wing Commander John Lawrence, after his 28 years in the RAF, took early retirement and became an assistant secretary to the MCC, another bastion of tradition. With his turned-up moustache and his near-worship of the Royal Family, he comes over as the archetypal Flying Officer ...”

“... both are made by the individual, who puts himself into them, puts in his ‘life illusion’, as John Cowper Powys called it, his unconscious fears and desires. History will not work without fiction, or at least the fictive principle, which Scott renounced as far as he could. This of course amounts to choosing a principle of another kind, but a negative ...”

“... promises of the New Testament – ‘If ye shall ask anything in my name, I will give it’ (John 14) – seemed not to be a promise. Faith might move mountains, but in an invisible mountain range. And I noticed that when people were speaking in tongues, instead of producing a nonsense version of English, they seemed to produce a tourist’s imitation of ...”