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“... inside, and the difference between the two structures is one of the most notable aspects: Turbine Hall A is the Art Deco showpiece, with its Speer-esque faience pilasters, while the modernist Hall B is relegated to a sideshow. Connections between the two are fiddly, because of the sharp changes in level on the original ...”

“... harsh and inviolable. Even Wilson’s feisty subject timed her pleasures to its unalterable rhythm.David Henkin sets out to discover how Americans became such creatures of the seven-day week. By the time the United States was founded as an independent republic, he writes, North Americans were already ‘by the contemporary standards of Europe … particularly ...”

“... fresh pasta and spliced Paolozzis, Ramparts, rampant kirks, laddies’ and ladies’ hat-works, David Humery, domes with hearty, clarty splashings, The crowned spire, the dungeons, the crags, the old lags, the seagulls Raucous on carless early mornings, the Firth of Forth perjink past crowsteps Of informatics, draughty parallelograms, pandas and heritage ...”

“... Once there was a town hall official in Cumberland who was so enthralled by the mountains that he walked and walked them, penetrating every byway, surveying every vista. To amuse himself he drew them and wrote about them, year after year. And the more his marriage languished, the more he walked, and drew, and wrote, until the seven volumes of A Pictorial Guide to the Lakeland Fells were complete ...”

“... of Oblivion, on my cheek a dark naevus that married a knobby knot in the planking. How long I’d been down and out was anybody’s guess; I’d guess an hour or more by the state of my suit, a foul rag-bag, by the state of my hair, a patty-cake, of my own ripe keck, unless it was the keck of Sandy Traill or Blind ...”

“... pages of the magazine, then only recently transformed by its odd and near invisible editor Hubert de Cronin Hastings, Betjeman’s jocular, impressionable soul was temporarily stolen by the hard men of the Modern Movement. Then, after Betjeman resigned, along came Pevsner, to hammer home the determinist message with which the magazine was obsessed. Or that is ...”

“... life that went beyond the left’s traditional concern with economic management. What he doesn’t do is draw a line between the New Left expansion of the political and the movements that were to emerge out of the late 1960s, or connect the thinking of Raymond Williams, E.P. Thompson, Stuart Hall et al with other strains of ...”

“... born in Britain in the past forty years who did not grow up to Muffin the Mule or Thunderbirds or Dr Who, and for whom the television set has been other than a natural adjunct to existence ever since. It would be equally hard to find natives of fifty-plus whose upbringing was not coloured by Dick Barton, Band Waggon or Monday Night at Seven (later, Eight) on ...”

“... on Naxos on his way home, leaving her to while away her time by orgying with Bacchus. Steven Hall, who went to art school and would therefore fit right in with a semi-conceptual ‘organisation’ such as ours, seems to have plugged into a very similar network of associations in his first novel, The Raw Shark Texts. The book has a girlfriend left behind ...”

“... French – still searching for an English publisher), Richard Schickel’s D. W. Griffith and now David Robinson’s Chaplin. All have one vital quality in common, and are preceded in this respect by Alexander Walker’s book on Garbo: they depend far less upon books of film history than upon first-class and first-hand research. Instead of a furtive glance at ...”

“... valleys – are depicted in a montage sequence almost entirely devoid of human figures. Only once do we glimpse four civilians fleeing from a flooded factory. (There is, of course, some cosmeticisation of history involved here: according to Paul Brickhill, whose book The Dam Busters was a major source for the film, the raid caused the deaths of 1294 people by ...”

“... father could conceive of no other possible course than to imprison him in the family banking hall for 18 pointless years. Victorian commercial dynasties which refrained from opting out of Trade exacted as their price of membership a subscription to the creed of daily toil. However opulent the surroundings in which their members passed their lives, they ...”

“... however, Obama was not up for cancelling the debate, and McCain was faced with a no-win choice (do the debate and seem indecisive, refuse and look scared). The location also had rich significance: the University of Mississippi was the site of one of the defining moments of the civil rights struggle, when the black student James Meredith insisted, against ...”

“... now a snack for sophisticates. Charlie Chaplin, Laurel and Hardy and a generation of English music-hall comedians wore bowlers to accentuate the contrast between their outré manners and those of the respectable middle classes. The bowler, as Fred Miller Robinson points out in The Man in the Bowler Hat (1993), had been designed as a riding hat for English ...”

“... entire editorial board. No one, I suppose, wants to be in a movement with the people across the hall, and yet many movements – the Cambridge School, the Yale School, the Chicago School – have been so constituted. So new historicism, as we are told here by two of its founding figures, ‘resisted systematisation’ and ‘became rather good at slipping ...”