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“... The French​ national necropolis of Notre Dame de Lorette lies on a plateau to the north of Arras where a pilgrims’ chapel once stood. The bodies of some forty thousand French soldiers who died in the Great War were buried here in the 1920s: half of them, unidentified, in mass graves; the other half beneath long lines of concrete crosses, each with a small metal label to give a name ...”

“... Who can resist the appeal of the English country house? Publishers are well aware of their popularity – which is doubtless explained by snobbery and the antique trade as much as anything – so we have a constant stream of books on the subject as well as the phenomenon of those cognoscenti aptly characterised recently in the pages of Harpers and Queen as the ‘National Trust Navy ...”

“... The Scott Street exterior of the west wing of Glasgow School of Art in 1933. I had​ the daily pleasure of seeing the west wing of the Glasgow School of Art, with its castle-like stonework and triple tall oriels rising dramatically from the steep slope of Scott Street, when, for more than a decade, I taught architectural history at the Mackintosh School of Architecture ...”

“... efforts to master the difficulties of a steep roadside site, at the Red House in Godalming (for Gavin Stamp, ‘an unsung masterpiece’), with its sheer elevations of brick, in which the Tudor almost met the Machine Age. As Lutyens’s style moved from Arts and Crafts through Palladian classicism towards abstraction of forms and his own arcane system ...”

“... to pare down forms to their simplest state. His work is blunt to the point of primitivism, and Gavin Stamp astutely draws out the underlying similarities between Thomson and the most advanced High Victorian Goths working in England at the same time, in particular Burges, Butterfield and Street. Of course, Thomson’s stylistic idiom was absolutely ...”

“... In the most hapless of perversions, in 1883 he went spectacularly, notoriously mad. At the root of Gavin Stamp’s study lies a question which makes it more than just an architectural monograph. How far was Scott’s madness brought on by a cultural crisis which beset the Gothic Revival round about 1880 and troubled all its abler partisans, and how far by ...”

“... the sad years when so many of London’s traditional Clubs fell under the auctioneer’s hammer. Gavin Stamp stands in waistcoat and fob-watch in ‘the essential profusion of accumulated clutter’ which he has built up in his ‘Standard Late Georgian Fourth Rate London terraced house’ near King’s Cross. Gervase Jackson-Stops, the National ...”

“... architects’ decision to retain the vast interior of Gilbert Scott’s ‘temple of power’, as Gavin Stamp has called it, was absolutely right. From the very start, Herzog and de Meuron proposed that the Turbine Hall should be left more or less intact and the exhibition galleries placed within the adjacent Boiler House. In their early computer ...”

“... commentary requires the combined efforts of Colin Amery, Mary Lutyens, Jane Brown, John Cornforth, Gavin Stamp and John Summerson to do justice to an architect whose career, in its range, dimensions and achievements, outshines Wren, Vanbrugh and the Adam brothers. Cloud-capp’d towers, gorgeous palaces, solemn temples: Lutyens made them all. Prospero’s ...”

“... not by Geoff Dyer but (though equally good) The Memorial to the Missing of the Somme by the late Gavin Stamp. Today, with Brexit once more in the balance, the end of the first chapter seems apposite: ‘How curious, but how significant, that one of the finest works of British architecture of the 20th century should stand not in Britain itself but on the ...”

“... even Mandy the Temp, in her anachronistically fab gear, seems to be trying to catch the eye of Gavin Stamp). An increasingly silly catalogue of deaths and suicides announces the final surrender of the Golden Age Murder Mystery: Agatha Christie force-fed on Pevsner and the humbug of Kenneth Baker’s latest flag-waving anthology. A sub-genre that has ...”

“... eloquent,’ he said. ‘In other words we can cut it.’ He placed a numbered label, like a tiny stamp, over the place he had just touched with the stimulator. The number was carefully catalogued by one of the nurses, while he moved on to the next patch. The professor called this process ‘mapping’, as if each human brain were an uncharted country being ...”

“... of shy alcoholic confidence, that The Unquiet Grave had ‘made’ him. It certainly inspired him. Gavin Ewart described it as ‘the Great Missing War Poem of World War Two’. Perhaps Logan Pearsall Smith had come close to writing the War Poem of World War One? The indirections and resonances of art, particularly the kind of conscious verbal art that ...”

“... the early 1980s – Tony Banks, Margaret Beckett, Jeremy Corbyn, Michael Meacher, Clare Short, Gavin Strang – have been given only walk-on roles in the Cabinet, while younger recruits to Benn’s Campaign Group, such as Paul Boateng and Dawn Primarolo, have not been allowed to speak in their own voices by Gordon Brown. No one has been more aware of the ...”

“... the two addresses of the parties to the transaction, the quantity of bitcoin moved and a time stamp, and run them through a ‘hash function’. These are cryptographical algorithms for encoding information: the one bitcoin uses is called SHA-256. The hash function takes a stream of information of any length and turns it into a unique set of letters and ...”