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“... of glass, cross-braced columns, glass balustrades, glass elevators, and a modicum of stainless steel and wood. The aesthetic of early Modern architectural fantasies (in particular Mies’s early skyscraper drawings) adumbrated such things, but real buildings did not achieve details on this scale. The smaller basic window unit in a classic curtain wall of ...”

“... John Nash’s commentary on his 1810 plan for Regent Street was clear about the social implications of what he was suggesting: ‘The whole communication from Charing-Cross to Oxford Street will be a boundary, and complete separation between the Streets and the Squares occupied by the Nobility and Gentry, and the narrower streets and meaner houses occupied by mechanics and the trading part of the community ...”

“... the West Country who ‘brought and made a secure place for pre-industrial England in the iron and steel of the Victorian Age’. Which is all very fine, except that there is something decidedly iron-and-steel also about a cricketer who chose as Grace did to play day in, day out, for as many teams as he could, and who piled ...”

“... man from Thunderbirds intended to flog the place off and boot out most of the types with tubular steel desks and potted plants. ‘At first I felt able to trust only three people in a company of about 198,000,’ Edwardes writes: his secretary, his personal assistant and John McKay, the communications director, all of whom ...”

“... the mate, brought the tender over to carry us back to the boat. The Poplar Voyager is a 90-foot steel motor yacht, built apparently for some millionaire whose wife decided she didn’t like it. Now it belongs to Bob Theakston, who’s been sailing these waters for twenty years, and operates charter cruises on it. At the beginning of the week we’d been ...”

“... a year as Literary Editor for the Nation, doing so well at matching books and reviewers that John Crowe Ransom said he deserved a Pulitzer Prize for it. ‘Not since Poe had an American poet laid down the law in quite such a carnival spirit.’ In those days of talented amateurs the Eng Lit business was still the Gay Science. Used by Nietzsche, and as a ...”

“... career, and he wrote to Benjamin Franklin about his problems. Franklin replied that if he could steel himself to be ‘indefatigably diligent’ and ‘frugal’ and ‘temperate’ and ‘abstemious’ he would live to ‘walk over the graves’ of his enemies. Isaac Hunt could not bring himself to be any of those things. Nor could his son. But they were ...”

“... Levinson says, with ‘hundred-kilo bags of sugar or twenty-pound cheeses nestled next to two-ton steel coils’. ‘Unloading bananas required the longshoremen to walk down a gangplank carrying eighty-pound stems of hard fruit on their shoulders. Moving coffee meant carrying fifteen-kilo bags to a wooden pallet placed in the hold, letting a winch lift the ...”

“... Groucho’s moustache, glasses, cigar, wing-tipped head of hair, Chico’s sly open mouth and steel-wool hair identifying the ersatz Italian Jew. The three faces jump out at you from the sheet music for A Night at the Opera in Al Hirschfeld’s 1935 collage. There’s Al Freuh’s jaunty economical outline of, unmistakably, the showman George M. Cohan ...”

“... It seems that the likes of Edward Larocque Tinker, Robert P. Swierenga and Colonel John S. ‘Rip’ Ford have all made valuable contributions to our knowledge of the cowboy world, and Richard Slatta’s Cowboys of the Americas* sets out to illuminate the structures and processes behind the historical underpinning behind those who wear spurs ...”

“... staged its superb Africa exhibition in 1995. In the book that marks the opening of the galleries, John Mack warns against ‘a monolithic reinvention of African culture and history’, preferring ‘to open up a new gateway into a collection that can be mined in very many ways to show something of African varieties of life and ...”

“... to work out – the exact path that a given load was taking through the network of assembled steel and stone. It was certain that the loads, dead and live, were being resisted. As they are today and will be tomorrow. Until they’re not. Another story Galdi liked to tell involved the design of a car park. He was once asked to determine the total load on ...”

“... murals to the Tate was an attempt to realise that ambition; to the same end, in 1964, he accepted John and Dominique de Menil’s commission to be the sole artist represented on the walls of a college chapel in Houston. The de Menils had already entrusted the design of the chapel to Johnson as part of his master plan for the University of St Thomas. The ...”

“... of warfare hope will animate the rank and file, they themselves do not necessarily share them. As John Keegan pungently demonstrates, warfare since tribal times has always been divided more or less unevenly between those who direct it, those who enjoy it (in different contexts and for different reasons) and those who suffer it. This last class would ...”

“... is angry because he has been kept waiting for ten minutes. He is a lanky, donnish-looking man with steel-framed spectacles and a skew-whiff tie. The clerk of the court sits in front of him, expertly manipulating files, charts and legal texts while keeping up a continuous stream of conversation with him. On the row directly in front of the clerk sit the defence ...”