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“... unbreakable spirit to win! Fighting the Hun with pepper? Was that something that Jimmy Perry and David Croft, the fecund scriptwriters of Dad’s Army, dreamed up in a dizzy moment? Not so. Charles Graves, an early historian of the Home Guard, refers to a unit which suggested in orders that any rudimentary weapons ‘could be usefully supplemented by a ...”

“... to wander, our batteries go dead, our hearing-aid ceases to function. I have to say what Professor David Minter is far too sensitive a critic not to know well, often hints but never says outright. Large regions of Faulkner’s novels are inaudible. In the racing sense as well as the literary sense let us have a glance at his form in that alleged masterpiece ...”

“... are appropriate. Lutyens’s preference for bricks and timber, stone and slate, rather than for steel and concrete, plate-glass and box girders, betokened a greater affinity with the world and values of Renaissance humanism than with the utilitarian impersonality of the Welfare State. ‘When Democracy builds’ was the title of an ardent and prophetic ...”

“... to breach reverberating violently back through me, as though I had tried to smash through a steel door with my fist. But Stefan remembers seeing a volume of foreign poetry in translation in the basement. So he finds it, copies out a German version of the first lines of Song of Myself, and treats the salon to a garbled reworking of Walt Whitman. No one ...”

“... argue local politics, state politics, world events, Truman against MacArthur, Truman against the steel companies. They were Truman Democrats, working men, or sons of working men, but they had to admit Truman might have gone too far when he tried to take over Youngstown Steel. Probably the Supreme Court was right when they ...”

“... England, Indian food was thought to be anything sprinkled with curry powder: a substance Elizabeth David described as ‘unlikeable, harshly flavoured, and possessed of an aroma clinging and as all-pervading in its way as that of English boiled cabbage or cauliflower’. ‘To me the word “curry” is as degrading to India’s great cuisine as the term ...”

“... You​ ought to be in a kindergarten,’ a Canadian nurse exclaimed to David Jones, aged twenty, awaiting transfer home in July 1916 after being wounded in Mametz Wood. Even a decade later, photographs show a wary child or an understudy for an adult. Prudence Pelham, the staunchest of his extended female fellowship, described him as ‘completely unsexed ...”

“... in Phu My. They’re much bigger than barrels. They’re hollow, tapered columns of thick, painted steel, hundreds of feet tall and hundreds of tonnes in weight, which raise wind turbines high off the ground and give their immense rotor blades space to turn. The Hanna was delivering newly made wind towers, in sections, to Hull, where they would be put on ...”

“... came to see some kind of accommodation with Hitler as the only solution. Above all, coal, iron and steel interests, the heavy metal groups, had been opposed to the republic from the outset. Suffering from overproduction, international competition and high labour costs, they were hostile to the trade-union rights, compulsory arbitration and welfarism that ...”

“... share of the world market for manufactured goods shrank by 23 per cent. America’s share of world steel production shrank from 50 to 20 per cent. Only the UK had a lower rate of gross capital formation as a percentage of GDP. Stein argues that this was a fundamental structural crisis, not merely a low point in the economic cycle. Core sectors of American ...”

“... to malls with pools of meltwater on their papered roofs, to the arterial that overlooked puddled steel yards and the state mental hospital and transmission towers feeding soaps and game shows to the ether; to the beltways and, beyond them, to a million acres of thawing hinterland where pick-ups were axle-deep in clay and .22s were fired in the woods and only ...”

“... phenomenon. He longed to introduce into the teeming variety of Empire a structural core of steel and concrete. It was no accident that he was an early associate of the Fabians, nor that his career ran foul of Winston Churchill. When Amery first met Churchill at Harrow he pushed him into the school swimming-pool. Later on it was usually Churchill who ...”

“... garlic, and John Minton’s seductive, and faintly Post-Impressionist, illustrations to Elizabeth David. Brooke, after the war, heads for the Mediterranean as fast as he possibly can, but, being Brooke, he is already deeply nostalgic for his Army days there and strives to reanimate certain epiphanic moments – with no success whatever. In his largely ...”

“... like swallows. Hard hats and yellow tabards monkeying over the scaffolding of shrouded towers, the steel ribs of emerging stadia. Early risers, in the privilege of first-use recreation, a smudge of sun burning off the fug of pollution that hangs over a pre-Olympic city, fall into quiet conversation. Ice-cream kiss of almond blossom, bridal abundance of ...”

“... second volume of The Best Short Stories of John Buchan, excellently and informatively edited by David Daniell. In Buchan’s social outlook there is a strong ‘zoological’ streak (somewhat recalling Kipling). It is strong in The Half-Hearted, which I happen to have been rereading. People in this novel belong to ‘kinds’. Lewis Haytoun, when unhappy ...”