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“... I do not come to Lilliputia with a measuring stick.’ This was Gore Vidal, a week or two ago, when asked to say which of our two main parties was the more right-wing. The British election, in Gore’s lofty view, is ‘parish-pump politics’, a juvenile charade compared to America’s great billion-dollar circuses ...”

“... Leonardo da Vinci is seldom out of the news. The story of 2011 was the Salvator Mundi, a serene and ringletted image of Christ formerly considered the work of a pupil or imitator, but now – after restoration, analysis and a substantial helping of hype – attributed to the brush of the master. No sooner had this excitement died down than the long-running saga of Leonardo’s lost mural The Battle of Anghiari was back in the headlines ...”

“... looking back it is odd to remember how few people even wanted one as a gift, their children could do so much better. At Kettle’s Yard, which has just reopened after a two-year refit, the art is everywhere, part of the texture of the house. A Brancusi head sits on top of a grand piano; a Ben Nicholson hangs at knee height under a window; the attic is devoted ...”

“... Now he tore up the steps of the building at the charge, exploding through the inner door into the hall. An extraordinary current of physical energy, almost of electricity, suddenly pervaded the place. I could feel it stabbing through me. This was the CIGS. Thus Anthony Powell brilliantly evokes the dynamic personal impact of General Sir Alan Brooke in his ...”

“... part of the province’s culture. The first night, I sit up with the film’s director, David Hammond, adding bits to the script. We’re in the sunroom, as he calls it – a big glass-domed upstairs sitting-room at the back of his house. Purple summer dark, stars, streetlights climbing Divis, or the Black Mountain, as it’s called. We stare out at ...”

“... weekend in the local barber’s he had come across a photo of the ‘most bizarre-looking man I’d ever seen. Everything about him looked extraordinary: his clothes, his hair, even the way he was standing.’Reg’s parents were a war couple. His dad was an amateur trumpet-player who spotted his mother in the audience one night. ‘They were both stubborn ...”

“... let increasing joblessness and other changes in the British economic and political climate do much of his anti-union work for him. By the time he finally introduced union legislation in October 1982, there were more than three million unemployed (the number had nearly tripled since Thatcher’s election), but her government had been made almost ...”

“... tutors at the family home at Poltimore near Exeter, and later at Winchester. He entered Trinity Hall, Cambridge, in 1771 and a few months later appears in the admissions register at Lincoln’s Inn. He stayed for less than two years at Cambridge, and seems to have travelled for about a year on the Continent before returning to quality as a barrister at ...”

“... took on a North American look. The dust-jacket shows the austere lonic Portland stone sculpture hall. Spalding observes, justly, that by insisting on the intervention of the American architect John Russell Pope in 1929 the sponsor, Lord Duveen of Millbank, was promoting, against the inclinations of British curators and civil servants, the ‘latest American ...”

“... employs irregular volumes – often ovoid and elliptical ones, such as the pinecone GLA City Hall in London (1998-2002) or the cocoon Sage Music Centre in Gateshead (1997-2004) – they are just odd enough to be distinctive, nothing more. ‘Foster’ also exudes a heady air of refined efficiency that almost any business or government would want to ...”

“... issues, when investors had no right to elementary financial information about the companies they’d invested in, and when stockbrokers lacked the resources or incentive to undertake serious research into them. In 1896, Harry Lawson launched his unsound motor-car stock not with anything so mundane as a realistic prospectus, but with the dual attractions of the ...”

“... the expectation that the beneficiary country would buy the pavilion on completion. The first to do so was Belgium, in 1907, followed by Hungary, Britain and Bavaria (now the German pavilion) in 1909, and the French and Swedish pavilions in 1912 (the latter was given to the Netherlands when the Swedes failed to pay). After the First World War came ...”

“... when we see them because they at once over and underperform to an extent that other commodities do not. For Ngai, the gimmick may take the shape of an idea, technique or thing-like device, but is best understood as a performance: it is ‘both a wonder and a trick’, she argues, in a formulation which launches the book’s series of case studies. These are ...”

“... in mid-20th-century Britain and the extent to which the empire had featured in them. Catherine Hall opened Civilising Subjects (2002) by describing her Baptist upbringing in Leeds. Missionaries and African students often passed through the home: ‘The sense of a Baptist family stretching across the globe was always part of domestic life.’ In an appendix ...”

“... in an antique shop before going round the much larger antique centre in Philip Webb’s parish hall. 6 January. Papers full of Charles Kennedy being, or having been, an alcoholic. I’d have thought Churchill came close and Asquith, too, and when it comes to politics it’s hardly a disabling disease. Except to the ...”