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“... last thirty years is to compare the introductions to the first and most recent editions of Edward Jones and Christopher Woodward’s Guide to the Architecture of London. In 1983, they wrote of a city in decline, its population down by about a sixth from its postwar height. ‘London is cleaner and uglier than it was at the beginning of the century; but it is ...”

“... guide its policy. The National Curriculum’s defenders are of two sorts. The first, who include Norman Stone, believe in it as a means of ‘ramming the national culture down pupils’ throats’. The second see it as a means of guaranteeing access for all to the same kinds of knowledge and understanding. But these defenders from the left in fact encounter ...”

“... George Watson’s A.E. Housman: A Divided Life is more like one, but it is not quite one; of Norman Marlow and Maude Hawkins I say nothing. The most satisfying book about Housman is A.S.F. Gow’s Housman: A Sketch but, as Mr Graves says, its aims are limited, since it is mainly concerned with Housman’s scholarship. Mr Graves’s book takes us through ...”

“... time, with a cast of thousands, that stood no chance of ever being completed. (Winogrand admired Norman Mailer, rivalled him in scope, energy, ambition – and in a disdain for any internal system of brakes. As it happens, he photographed Mailer at his fiftieth birthday party in 1973, on the receiving end of a finger-wagging lecture from a guest, so that the ...”

“... of them – an evening billed as ‘Art and Politics’ – the Black poet and playwright LeRoi Jones (soon to become Amiri Baraka) held forth, along with the Black saxophonist Archie Shepp and the white painter Larry Rivers. The audience was composed almost entirely of people like me and my friends: white middle-class liberals and radicals, many of whom ...”

“... set the Imperial Edwardian tone of much that was to follow – was made by the back elevation of Norman Shaw’s Piccadilly Hotel. ‘It’s a grim business this new stone section of the Quadrant,’ C.H. Reilly wrote in 1922. ‘No one can deny the power of the design. The situation of a bull in a china shop is not improved by the magnificence of the ...”

“... in one of the blood-lettings to which Paris – described as the ‘homicidal city’ by the Norman poet Robert Blondel – was prone at this time, are shown to have been critical to the political polarisation of France into two mutually hostile zones. To speak, as Sumption does, of an ‘iron curtain’ partitioning France may be an exaggeration, but ...”

“... forged a cross-generational political community. The British Black Panthers, notably Altheia Jones-LeCointe and Darcus Howe, organised a demonstration against police harassment at the Mangrove on 9 August 1970. More than a hundred protesters marched through the area chanting ‘Black power! People power!’ They met a phalanx of officers outside Notting ...”

“... told me the DPRK had bartered missile technology for centrifuge blueprints from Pakistan. Brian Jones, who retired from the Defence Intelligence Analysis Staff of the Ministry of Defence just before the invasion of Iraq last year, and who gave evidence to the Hutton and Butler inquiries, has emphasised that the development of nuclear weapons implies an ...”

“... General Pile’s plan is discussed by that alert and indefatigable chronicler of the Home Front, Norman Longmate, in Hitler’s Rockets, a sequel to The Doodlebugs. The General admitted that the difficulties were prodigious. For one thing, the rockets came in on erratic courses, with a target accuracy of plus or minus several miles. Existing radar sets were ...”

“... nuts with the boredom and hang one on somebody. But I am being very restrained. I am waiting for Norman Mailer who is a glass-jawed punk with no defence. I fell over a cloud yesterday and busted my arm in two places. Doc said it was the worst double fracture he had seen since the 16th century. Busted the humerus clean off at the end and the whole elbow swole ...”

“... milk-stained by the sun. From the window of the hotel I could see a distant church tower in Norman style, so I walked toward it. Built in 1957, it was not as old as it looked. Above the door was an unusually small black-and-white photograph of our host, Saddam Hussein, the President or Rais of Iraq, indicating (I hope) that the churches as well as the ...”

“... people into her fiction more naturally than Monimbo manages with, for instance, Castro and Norman Mailer. Her good American English is laced with wisecracks, sad-funny like Woody Allen’s, clever-naive like Salinger’s. The English dialogue of Monimbo is very poor, by comparison. At one point, the Mossgrave Partnership attempts to create a ...”

“... in his own life made it particularly precious to him. Aged nearly forty, Williams fell for Phyllis Jones, the 25-year-old blonde librarian at Amen House. This was the first of a series of affairs in which he would opt for a blessed state of sexual frustration. The relationship was that of lover and mistress, but also master and pupil. ...”

“... these bridges were otherwise pretty much the same as those liable to be cut away under Indiana Jones as he is chased through the South American jungle. New Zealand’s swing bridges came to mind when it turned out that the Millennium Bridge had a wobble. Reading about it I felt it in my feet. Suspension bridge technology has been pushed forward by a ...”