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“... the most famous of which are The Changes (1975), an apocalyptic children’s series adapted from Peter Dickinson’s novels; Children of the Stones (1977), another children’s series about a secret pagan society embedded within an isolated village; The Stone Tape (1972), a Nigel Kneale-scripted story about a building whose very fabric retains sinister ...”

“... true that some modern art has imitated the primitive energy, the folk spells, of graffiti. Peter Fuller’s Modern Painters, a quarterly ‘journal of the fine arts’, launched last spring, challenges many of the fashionable practices and assumptions which I have just reviewed. At first, its opponents in the art world said it wouldn’t last, then ...”

“... a slasher – though there is a very severe notice of the autobiographies of Anthony Powell and Peter Quennell – and he seems to enjoy being generous to other reviewers, as when he justly praises John Updike. He is full of gratitude to literary editors, commemorating Ian Hamilton’s work on the New Review in terms only this side of idolatry. Such writers ...”

“... triumphs are those of 1945, 1964 and 1997; neither has found any inspiration in 1924 or 1929. Peter Clark and David Torrance both set out to reassert the political importance of the 1924 government and to restore the place of its senior figures in the history of the Labour Party. Both focus on high politics, and in particular the way the members of the ...”

“... World War cemeteries at Thiepval and Etaples, that the Lutyens admired by Frank Lloyd Wright, Peter Behrens and even Le Corbusier can be discerned. It is here, too, that the links to Lutyens’s masters Norman Shaw and Philip Webb appear, not in literal borrowings but in their shared toughness of architectural ...”

“... matter obscure and then deftly double-crossing anyone foolish enough to have trusted him. Beatrice Webb understood him well: ‘He is a blatant intriguer – and every word he says is of the nature of an offer “to do a deal”. He neither likes nor dislikes you; you are a mere instrument, one among many – sometimes of value, sometimes not worth picking ...”

“... something about him apart from his wealth and glamour instantly aroused suspicion. Beatrice Webb called him the most brilliant man in the Commons, but argued that ‘so much perfection argues rottenness somewhere.’ F.E. Smith, another unscrupulous chancer whom Mosley idolised, called him ‘the perfumed popinjay of scented boudoirs’. His voice ...”

“... multiplication of the unfit’. Progressives like Havelock Ellis, Bernard Shaw and Sidney Webb were swayed by these arguments, at least for a time; and Ellis (while condemning the Nazis’ racism and anti-semitism) defended Hitler’s ideas on compulsory sterilisation as late as 1937. The coming world state in Anticipations was called the New ...”

“... beyond doubt by exclaiming – “Oh! Valentino!” ’ Even party intellectuals like Beatrice Webb allowed themselves to be charmed by him, but then thought the worse of him for it: ‘So much perfection,’ she said, ‘argues rottenness somewhere.’ Ellen Wilkinson was more amusing: ‘The trouble with Oswald Mosley is that he is too good-looking ...”

“... Clause 4 of the Party’s Constitution, indelibly inscribed on the tablets of stone which Sidney Webb had brought down from Mount Sinai in 1918, was something quite different. Crossman’s tribal instincts and his loyalty to the Left made him anti-Gaitskell here. ‘But,’ piped up the intellectual, ‘of course it’s true that the anti’s, led by Michael ...”

“... pioneering descriptions, and both lay appropriate stress on the early influences of Shaw, Webb and the Arts and Crafts Movement on Lutyens’s formative years. O’Neill’s book is a thorough, perceptive survey of the houses, with the illustrations well integrated into the text. Gradidge’s volume is less satisfactory. Despite its title, four of the ...”

“... carrying out the tests on Josephine he and I chatted about the great days of Charlie Cooke, David Webb and Peter Osgood. He told me it was already too late to try AZT and 3TC on Josephine but he was cautiously hopeful. ‘To get Aids there has to be mixing of blood, which means there has to be a break in the skin or an open ...”

“... because I may be some help on Commons’). Blair also offered advice to Rupert and James Murdoch. Peter Mandelson offered to prep Brooks for an appearance before the Commons Culture, Media and Sport Select Committee. Two Conservative peers gave glowing character references: Baron Black of Brentwood, a former director of the Press Complaints Commission, for ...”

“... thou never wert.’‘Thou art unseen’: there could be no higher praise. The scholar Timothy Webb once made the deceptively simple observation that for a poet notorious for emphasising the positive in the form of revolutionary optimism, Shelley was conspicuously good at using negative constructions. ‘Scatter, as from an unextinguished hearth/Ashes and ...”

“... on friendly terms with men such as William Godwin and the great satirical poet John Wolcot, ‘Peter Pindar’, whom Pitt’s government regarded as dangerously disloyal.Friendship was his true vocation and chief talent, and he worked at it tirelessly. The great majority of his numerous poems – he described them, without false modesty, as ...”