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“... manifesto of Post-Modern architecture. There, in a famous opposition, Robert Venturi and Denise Scott Brown distinguished Modernist design, in which ‘space, structure and programme’ are subsumed in ‘an overall symbolic form’, which they called the ‘duck’, from Post-Modern design, in which ‘space and structure are directly at the service of ...”

“... understandable distaste from the tone of Mollie Panter-Downes, and of a 1943 broadcast by Peter Scott from which he quotes, that he is unable to accept the essential truths contained in their vulgar propaganda. Much of his energy is spent in battering at open doors. He emphasises that Dunkirk was a military disaster and quotes Churchill’s speech to that ...”

“... was repugnant to fellow architects who, nevertheless, appreciated his artistic genius. Gilbert Scott went, privately, to inspect Pugin’s church in Cheadle. When Charles Barry came to design the interiors of the Palace of West-minster he knew that he must go back to Pugin, who had drawn Barry’s competition entry. No one else understood Gothic well ...”

“... I felt I’d come across non-violent uses of this verb, and indeed it is said by Liddell and Scott to mean ‘to put, place, with or without a notion of haste’. And see Matthew 8, where it twice means ‘to put a sick person to bed’. Perhaps Thomas is again, as in the Bethany incident and elsewhere, subject to a little interactive psychological ...”

“... history repressed is more interesting than history expressed, as in the poetry of Southey, Scott, even Shelley. Besides, this historical foraging into the bad conscience of Wordsworth the ex-radical challenges the portrait of Wordsworth as counter-revolutionary which began to take shape around 1950, to be gradually developed by some of the leading ...”

“... Oakland’s general manager, Billy Beane, and his Yale-educated sidekick, a numbers guy called Paul DePodesta, who attempted to apply Wall Street style derivatives analysis to the problem of how to win baseball games. What’s attractive about sport from this point of view is that it gives you a yes or no answer, a win or a loss. Beane and DePodesta were ...”

“... his paedophilic housemaster. If Williams’s notion does not take sufficient account of the Paul Foots of this world, it also fails to take account of the army of ex-working-class socialists who are not averse to swapping their political beliefs for a Jacobean farmhouse in Kent. Orwell did not get a bullet through his throat in Spain because he was ...”

“... whom he appeared (as Auden once succinctly put it) ‘a most bleak old bore’. The distinction of Paul Hamilton’s formidable new book, Metaromanticism, is the success with which it translates these Romantic predicaments into contemporary terms, so as to make them feel wholly up-to-date. The subject is properly convoluted and Hamilton’s prose is not shy of ...”

“... noted committed Trumpistas (Rudy Giuliani, Newt Gingrich, Chris Christie); a few party stalwarts (Paul Ryan, Mitch McConnell – who was booed) taking a sip of, if not exactly drinking the Trump Kool-Aid; and a breadline of hungry ‘rising stars’, fixed on the 2020 elections, hoping to be discovered as Barack Obama was at the 2004 Democratic Convention. On ...”

“... Great unknowns, pen names and spoof attributions figure centrally in the genre’s history, from Scott, to George Eliot, to Kilgore Trout. According to the massive, nine-volume Dictionary of Anonymous and Pseudonymous English Literature there are, largely speaking, only three reasons for masked authorship, all prudential: ‘Generally the motive is some form ...”

“... his discreetly disturbed life all the way to the end. The French text has an epigraph from Walter Scott at the beginning and ends with a quotation from Pascal: ‘Who is it who said, “A king without diversion is a man full of wretchedness”?’ Alyson Waters’s translation provides a longer passage from Pascal, which gives us a context for the ...”

“... and dark thoughts about fathers mingle with the feeling that it’s all well-known to be in F. Scott Fitzgerald’s books, or in daily stories about high society, drugs, spouse murder, alimony and – so we are now told – sleeping with trumpets. Edie, because Stein and Plimpton know how to interweave as well as interview, doesn’t succumb to merely ...”

“... standing in for Versailles, Madame DuBarry is closer to Sofia Coppola’s Marie Antoinette than to Paul Greengrass’s Bloody Sunday, offering history as reverie, as style. It entices us with images, seduces us with spectacle, and sees history as a series of purely personal moments. In effect, the causes of the French Revolution boil down to a ...”

“... come the writer nobs: Jack Kerouac, ‘babbling on with the fluency of a jammed beer-tap’, Jean-Paul Sartre, whose ‘demand that intellectuals should “integrate with the masses” seems even more unreal than it would otherwise, coming from a man who could not bear to face an orange’. It does seem a bit doubtful that plain bread-earners share these ...”

“... power to appoint anyone to inquire into anything on its behalf (prominently at the moment, the Scott Inquiry into the Matrix-Churchill affair). Even the coroner’s inquest is a form of public inquiry. Together, these inquiries form a considerable tranche of constitutional practice, more catholic and deliberative than litigation, less partisan and more ...”