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“... the history of art as the history of more than art alone. Wilton’s essay on painting, taken with Peter Funnell’s on the London art world, Clive Wainwright’s on patronage and the applied arts and Simon Jervis’s on Rudolph Ackermann, build between them a picture of a period in which the whole idea of culture was being formed. The word itself was first ...”

“... not much has changed since Alison Smithson’s day. The chapter on Smithson, who with her husband, Peter, achieved a reputation out of all proportion to the number of buildings they put up, is one of Cooke’s best. Born in 1928, Smithson is among the youngest of the women she considers. A contemporary of Margaret Thatcher, Smithson, like Thatcher, made her ...”

“... air’. The various ‘horrid problems’ of Princess Margaret, her love affair with the divorced Peter Townsend, and her perceived reluctance to undertake royal duties, could be similarly teased away. From a sweltering hot Uganda the queen mother wrote to her younger daughter that every dignitary ‘looked gravely at my flushed & streaming face, & my red ...”

“... in the Ministry of Education and ever the brilliant talent scout, he secured the appointment of Peter Behrens as director of the Düsseldorf Academy. The same year he was instrumental in establishing the Deutsche Werkbund in Munich. The Werkbund was committed to design reform, as William Morris had been, but to reform that worked with industry not against ...”

“... Till recently, I’ve dodged most of Peter Reading’s work. He seemed so much the darling of the TLS and of a metropolitan circle whose powerfully disseminated views it is often essential to evade in the interests of finding a position which affords a degree of independence. Seeing stray poems by him in magazines, I thought of him as having a gift of designer outrage, whose appeal to the sophisticated might be suspect ...”

“... At Thomas Hodgkin’s memorial service, in 1982, Christopher Hill, formerly Master of Balliol, used the pulpit of the college chapel to give an address entirely free of religious reference, quite a feat in view of Hodgkin’s Quaker roots and Hill’s status as historian of the Puritan revolution ...”

“... murdering and dismembering six lonely young men at that dreaded address, Cranley Gardens, Muswell Hill, Dennis Nilsen must have basked in the thought that, even behind bars, he was still free to roam through the darker corners of the minds of all those people who had scorned or ignored him when he was a Job Centre counsellor and a pub bore. The man has ...”

“... 66 seems close to some lines by Giuseppe Ungaretti (1888-1970) translated by Marcus Perryman and Peter Robinson on page 38: but is there really an echo? If so, which way does it run? And is it in the originals or only in the translations? The Italian is not given so we cannot tell. The only gesture towards anchoring the poems in Italy is that each poet’s ...”

“... rue Kantari in Beirut to try to find Kim Philby’s flat. The street, which stands on top of the hill of Ras Beirut and looks out over the sparkling lights of St George Bay, is full of handsome limestone buildings that wouldn’t look out of place in the 16th arrondissement. Most are now abandoned shells, the balustrades and architraves still spattered with ...”

“... are not easily come by, even in the atmosphere of intellectual body-snatching unloosed by the Peter-house School of historians. Confronted with the raw clash between rich and poor brought about by Thatcherite-Lawsonite-Majorite policies, Adam Smith would have recoiled. The social policy he sought to develop was more civilised than anything on offer today ...”

“... set fire to the RAF bombing school – or training camp, depending on your point of view, though Peter Ho Davies tacitly takes the nationalist line – at Penrhos. Arthur drinks on the other side of the pub from the English soldiers, in the Welsh-speaking public bar. His daughter doesn’t share his politics: she’s ‘proud of her Welshness’ but ...”

“... and eleven days by camel into the Libyan desert, you come to Trimithis in the Great Oasis. On a hill above this little town stands a temple of Thoth, the Egyptian god of writing. Down below, digging has uncovered a schoolroom. Along one wall, a brick bench for the pupils; in the middle, a space where the master will have had his chair (then as now the ...”

“... Masque of the Red Death’ I were just cleaning up streets our kid. Just cleaning up streets. Peter Sutcliffe to his brother Carl: Somebody’s Husband, Somebody’s Son by Gordon Burn Ower t’ills o Bingley Stormclouds clap an drain, Like opened blood-black blisters Leakin pus an pain. Ail teems down like stair-rods, An swells canals an becks, An ...”

“... She danced on Ready Steady Go!, modelled for David Bailey, introduced Bob Dylan to London, broke Peter Blake’s heart, was part-owner of a frock shop in Carnaby Street, married and gave birth to a daughter all before dying in 1966 at the age of 28. Her story was remembered but her pictures weren’t: most languished in her brother’s garage until a Pop Art ...”

“... as an accountant among the big names of the City (Barings, Ansbacher, Singer and Friedlander, Hill Samuel) had prepared him perfectly for his chairmanship of Astra, a burgeoning, middle-ranking arms and explosives company which he had built up since 1981 with the help of the directors of a Scottish fireworks ...”