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“... Most of the chapters are a very personal kind of literary criticism of books by writers such as Peter Davidson (The Idea of North), Nan Shepherd (The Living Mountain), Richard Jefferies (Nature near London), J.A. Baker (The Peregrine), Jacquetta Hawkes (A Land) and Roger Deakin (Waterlog). It’s interesting that all ...”

“... waiting dejectedly for custom in his own surgery. Not only do cases or patients turn up at the Baker Street sitting-room with dramatic regularity, but each presents its own fascinating problem, which only the fantasy couple are competent to solve. What bored doctor could ask for more? Yet sometimes things seem to work the other way round. A highly ...”

“... der Rohe’s Farnsworth House, it glows at night, as if floating among the trees. Its architect, Peter Womersley, has been largely overlooked in accounts of British modernism, perhaps because he mostly worked in northern England and the Borders, leaving only a scattering of buildings, including the University of Hull sports centre and a concrete grandstand ...”

“... and go into schools have been astonishingly foolish. We thought that others listening to Kenneth Baker’s pronouncements as they tumbled out before, during and after the election would be bound to doubt his wisdom and good faith. We thought that other people would laugh, too, at his picture of all those classrooms in ‘loony left’ boroughs where peace ...”

“... one demands cause, the other demands purpose; both recoil from the random and the accidental. Peter Carey has deservedly won the Booker Prize for True History of the Kelly Gang. The WHSmith Book Award, continuing its flight from elitism, has renamed itself ‘The People’s Choice’. To have a go at being the people’s Kenneth ...”

“... can in many ways be as disgraceful as resignations. The leading figure here is Kenneth Baker, who perfected a theory about why he should slay as Home Secretary despite the succession of calamities that surrounded him, until he was eventually jettisoned by the Prime Minister after the 1992 election. Holding steadfastly to the view that policy was ...”

“... in the dim light of dawn to visit one of the males in his own territory.’ Back in the 1960s, Peter Parker was bitten by a radioactive arachnid, turned into Spiderman and acquired the ability to scuttle up the sides of tall buildings. Birkhead’s book could inspire a whole new breed of pornographic superheroes, replete with extraordinary powers and dark ...”

“... in this premier league, the referee could be stern and the spectators unbending. Unlike Herbert Baker, who was at his best on committees, Lutyens dismissed them as ‘horrible, ignorant and unsympathetic’, and was too intent on being a great man to learn the arts of compromise and conciliation. But while charm and insistence worked wonders with rich and ...”

“... My Search for Secrets in the Ruins of the Freedom of Information Act (Penguin, $30), Nicholson Baker charts ‘the pathology of government secrecy’ through myriad frustrated FOIA requests about the US government’s biological weapons programme in the 1950s.In many countries, FOI is accused of reducing transparency by encouraging a parallel, paperless ...”

“... This book begins with real passion as Ronald Hyam and Peter Henshaw lash into those historians who they believe have made unwarranted assumptions about the links between Britain and South Africa: to wit, that Britain fought the Boer War to get its hands on the gold and that economic considerations remained the motivating force in its difficult relationship with South Africa thereafter ...”

“... 1921, almost a decade after he had begun working on the plans for New Delhi. Lutyens and Herbert Baker, who had also been a pupil of Ernest George and Harold Peto’s many years before, were jointly appointed to this huge task, which would become a sour professional (and personal) battle and win them both knighthoods. The siting and designing of the vast ...”

“... grandmother had fled from Cossack persecution at Dvinsk. Flora Solomon, the author of Baku to Baker Street, was brought up in Minsk, a nearby town in the Jewish Pale of Settlement. She, too, had a gambler-philanderer-millionaire for a father, and she too, was impelled by her upbringing to become a socialist, and even to pass on the contagion to her son ...”

“... only so much damage one can do with a Robert Frost interview, but that didn’t stop the late Peter Matthiessen, one of the founding editors, from now and then leaving the office, or the Himalayas, to spy on supposed enemies of the United States. Matthiessen later said he had used the magazine as cover for some high-level snitching, but in the annals of ...”

“... the venerable retailer BHS in 2015 and his recent naming in the House of Lords by the Labour peer Peter Hain as a ‘powerful businessman using non-disclosure agreements and substantial payments to conceal the truth about serious and repeated sexual harassment, racist abuse and bullying’, Philip Green gave a self-congratulatory interview to the ...”

“... approach the subject from varying angles, and not all of them approach very close. Malcolm Baker writes on tomb sculpture, ‘the static intermediary between the earthly and the eternal’, where the stone figure of the Commendatore is undeniably a case in point. Peter Gay explores the opera’s ‘hidden ...”