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“... of Saddam Hussein remain unknown, but Tony Benn is alive and well and coming soon to a concert hall near you. Leaving Parliament in 2001 to devote more time to politics, Benn joined the B-list of political celebrities. He has appeared at the Glastonbury Festival and boasts his own website (www.tonybenn.com). As Tony Blair’s Government spins itself ...”

“... I struck Exmoor’, whose conversation would have been understood by ‘any man of the period of Simon de Montfort’, although not, alas, by Morton himself. A modicum of realism ensures the text is read as reportage. Here the accompanying photographs help, as does the occasional moment of comic bathos, when indigestion spoils a view, a local dialect is ...”

“... candidate in the London Mayoral Election, right across the river from the crumpled buttock of City Hall. Which is neither a hall, nor in the City, but an architectural doodle with the perverse ambition of bringing Manhattan to Bermondsey. ‘We’ve got mile after mile and acre after acre of land for our future ...”

“... the early 1950s when tourism was not yet an option. I walked through King’s, past Clare, Trinity Hall and Caius and then through the back gate of Trinity and out into Trinity Great Court and thought that this was how all cities should be. Nothing disconcerted this wondering boy and I even managed to find the smell of old dinner that clung to the screens ...”

“... and a disgusting drip.’ The physicalist party, note, is not always for celebrating the body. Simon Schama in his introduction says that Porter ventures where most historians fear: into Greek metaphysics, Christian theology, Cartesian philosophy. My complaint is that he sets out on this brave journey but then does not go far enough. The broad ...”

“... were warped in their image.‘Every Saturday night we had ballroom dancing in the great marble hall,’ said Caroline, ‘and the headmistress sat drumming her fingers, with a cigarette hanging out of her mouth and a glass of crème de menthe. We had to dance with her father, who’d been wounded as a sapper in the First World War: either he had his ...”

“... class’. Grandfather was a carpenter and undertaker, who made enough money to build a mission hall and see his son, Michael Foot’s father, established as a solicitor, and then as a famous Liberal MP. His sons, after the First World War, went to public schools and Oxbridge and ‘won entry into a political élite’. ‘Castle Foot’ was now ...”

“... president and governor of the Royal Shakespeare Theatre over many years and supported both Peter Hall and Peter Brook at a time when their avant-garde work frequently brought storms of criticism. He had a voracious appetite for both English and French literature and liked to hunt down French novels on the Left Bank. In most un-Tory fashion, he formed an ...”

“... professor of historical and comparative jurisprudence at Oxford and finally, master of Trinity Hall, Cambridge. Maine appeared to have shown Victorians how Europe, and Britain in particular, had achieved social and political modernity through the evolution of law and political institutions. He charted this progress from the original village ...”

“... was on the point of getting betrothed when he finally premiered King Lear. (She married Dr John Hall in 1607, the year between Lear’s performance at court and its publication.) Biographers have pointed out, too, that Shakespeare had a younger brother called Edmund, who followed him to London and into the theatre business. Did Shakespeare name the ...”

“... hundreds of thousands were built, had a bourgeois look. Coventry Cathedral and the Royal Festival Hall were modern architecture on a human scale. Though a high proportion of Londoners were being rehoused in flats, the LCC forbade the construction of blocks more than six storeys high. So there wasn’t a visible ‘social revolution’, or an invisible ...”

“... a pond with fish he’d caught from the Thames. ‘J.M.W. Turner and Walter Fawkes at Farnley Hall’ by John Wildman (c.1822) When Turner stayed with his patron and friend Walter Fawkes at Farnley Hall, north of Leeds, he fished on the River Wharfe and shot on the moors. He painted or drew what he caught or killed ...”

“... In the West, the analogous world of sound and silence can now be experienced only in the concert hall, and this perhaps partly explains the extreme attentiveness of audiences at concerts of classical music. At the Festival Hall, recently, three thousand people sat devoutly through a recital of the second book of Bach’s ...”

“... London Fields in Hackney, to Charles Saatchi’s oak-panelled chamber in the decommissioned County Hall, right alongside the Thames. The Wilson tank, like the one into which I was about to plunge, was a concept pool, around which visitors moved like catwalk models and talked in whispers. There was the unspoken threat of ritual baptism into some dark sect, for ...”

“... he painted out all the delegates, leaving only – set against the oppressive splendours of the Hall of Mirrors – a flag-draped coffin, guarded by two mad-looking half-nude soldiers in steel helmets, with two putti flying above carrying a wreath. This weird parody of a baroque funeral-monument (was it a joke? was it a ‘problem picture’?) was the hit ...”