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“... is more of a group chronicle than pure biography. One is The Life and Death of Krishnamurti by Mary Lutyens, his official biographer. It came out in 1990 and gathers up much of what she had been writing about him, extensively and indeed repetitiously, for the previous three decades. In the Fifties she had given a charming account of how Krishna and ...”

“... Chapter Four of Mary Lutyens’s memoir of her father finds her parents at Scheveningen, on their honeymoon. ‘For the first week they sat back to back on the beach in two of those old-fashioned high-backed basket chairs, she facing towards the sea and he towards the land, reaching back uncomfortably to hold hands ...”

“... Lutyens lives! After three decades in which his reputation has been in ashes, the most esteemed English architect of his time, whose death on New Year’s Day 1944 was mourned as if an emperor had passed, now returns in triumph to his phoenixed pedestal. That is the message of this torrent of books which have recently gushed from the architectural presses, pouring praise on Lutyens and his works ...”

“... a ‘queer fish’, according to her father, and already at twenty she appears in a drawing by Mary Newton with the distinctive profile, double chin and currant-bun hairstyle by which she was ever afterwards known. She was short-sighted and therefore observant of close detail and of masses of shape and colour in the middle distance. She had an excellent ...”

“... and more extraordinary. Washington recapitulates the story as told in the books of Lady Emily Lutyens and her daughter Mary, both deeply involved in it, to the dismay of Lady Emily’s husband, the architect Edwin Lutyens. Krishnamurti, son of an Indian Theosophist hangeron, was ...”

“... The​ Queen’s Dolls’ House, designed by Edwin Lutyens, was put on display at the British Empire Exhibition at Wembley in 1924. A twee descendant of Victoria and Albert’s Crystal Palace, three feet tall, it advertised the ingenuity of Britain’s manufacturers to the world. Its Palladian shell lifted off to reveal a miniature vision of upholstered modern life, as well as the tastes of its royal owners, Queen Mary and King George V ...”

“... family through an advantageous marriage in 1677 between Sir Thomas Grosvenor and the heiress Mary Davies, who also brought with her other London lands which later became Pimlico and Belgravia. Enjoying enormous natural advantages of location, from which indifferent early management could not detract, Mayfair was developed from the 1720s, and by the end ...”

“... of Swingler’s set by Britten, for instance, a nodding acquaintance only, or Rubbra, Maconchy, Lutyens, Vaughan Williams or John Ireland, say much about the ramifications and happenstance of the Popular Front, little about the value of Swingler’s words, which can often be pretty trite. Certainly, he thought this work important and said so, but for ...”

“... has a little cry. These occasions go on until about 1950 when Grandma dies. Grandma, whose name is Mary Ann Peel, has three daughters, Kathleen, Lemira and my mother, Lilian. Clarence is the eldest and the only son. Whenever he is talked of it is always ‘Our Clarence’ or, to my brother and me, ‘Your Uncle Clarence’. But he is only our would-be ...”

“... grief wasn’t genuine – though Nancy Astor was sure it would ‘pass like a mirage’. Edwin Lutyens was commissioned to design Cimmie’s tomb – a pink sarcophagus set in a sunken garden by the river at Savehay Farm. But Mosley told Harold Nicolson that he considered his movement her memorial and that he was ‘prepared willingly to die for it’. As ...”

“... flanked by Twenties mansions – now Spanish, now French, now severely Georgian, now picturesque Lutyens Tudor. The juxtapositions are as surreal as you could hope for from a new plutocracy, but the houses themselves have space to breathe, unlike comparable avenues of the same period in North London, with soulless and pretentious neo-William and ...”

“... the dead, and praying to those who, purified in the fires of the afterlife, could now ask God and Mary to reprieve those still suffering for their sins, and help us ahead of time for ours. But when this eschatological perspective weakened, the activity of the dead didn’t come to a stop, which was surprising: the Reformation and the Enlightenment combined to ...”

“... fruits while bad ones found their shoes filled with coal; on 1 May, the queenship of the Virgin Mary, bunches of lily of the valley were exchanged. Joan of Arc was one adoptive saint and heroine among many whose memory was kept with incense, flowers, singing and processions on her feast day, another spring festival since it fell on 30 May. The liturgical ...”

“... eldest child of John and Jane Beegan. In 1901 they were living together with the younger Beegans, Mary and Thomas, at 23 Dunlo Hill in Ballinasloe. On the census form, John Beegan senior describes himself and his two sons, John Leo and Thomas, as stonecutters. Ten years later, in the 1911 census, he chose the term ‘monumental stonemason’ – the family ...”

“... the left-hand side opening outwards, the pulley then closing the gate. It’s the kind of thing Lutyens would have delighted in and incorporated into one of his country houses. 17 August. Some time this last week a bearded man in a frock strolled through the National Gallery, observed by the warders, though not accosted by them until he reached the room ...”