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“... Moulded in terracotta relief above the door of an austere building in Shoreditch, on the northern fringes of the City of London, is an arresting motto: E Pulvere Lux Et Vis. The ‘light’ and ‘power’ were electrical; the ‘dust’ that was burned to generate them was the refuse from the surrounding streets. Twenty thousand tons of this fuel, most of it horse dung, was gathered locally every year ...”

“... of Britain. It does for public sculpture (but not sculpture inside churches or galleries) what Simon Bradley and Nikolaus Pevsner do for the buildings the sculpture is on (or near) in The Buildings of England volume on The City of London. In a way it does more. While buildings have to be interesting in themselves to get into Pevsner, Ward-Jackson can ...”

“... many times over, in the town where I grew up. Those engines were new in the 1970s. Unlike Simon Bradley I lack the trainspotter’s enthusiasm for locomotives, and I’ve had some horrible journeys on that train. But the theatrical grandeur of its arrival always alters my sense of my surroundings, as if a door had opened, offering a glimpse of an ...”

“... Pevsner’s is more difficult than it looks. It defeats A.N. Wilson in Who Was Oswald Fish?, as Simon Bradley points out in a wide-ranging essay on ‘Pevsner in Fiction, Theatre and Cinema’. Imitation even of the most laconic entries is difficult. Only Alan Hollinghurst, among Bradley’s examples, gets it nearly ...”

“... reading the wonderful fat new edition of Pevsner’s City of London, revised and expanded by Simon Bradley.* I found myself repeatedly escaping from the shallow architectural culture of Houston (founded 1836, the year of Texan independence) into imaginary rambles through my own city (founded 50 BC); and indulging a slightly self-conscious relish for ...”

“... or otherwise misused them. There were odious villains, such as the Astronomers Royal, James Bradley and Nevil Maskelyne, who used their Greenwich power base to orchestrate the conspiracy against Harrison. Maskelyne gloried in giving clockmakers ‘a bone to pick that would crack their teeth’. The day was saved by the King himself – mad George was ...”

“... In The Birth of Tragedy Nietzsche gives what Simon Critchley and Jamieson Webster call a ‘fascinating short interpretation’ of Hamlet, from which they take their title. They don’t think much of the book up to that point: it’s when he gets to Hamlet, they argue, that Nietzsche wakes up. This isn’t a view everyone would share, but it’s of a piece with the many assured judgments they make about Hamlet in the play with the most canonically self-doubting hero ...”

“... of Parliament, I must declare an interest: I am employed by the publisher of both the OED and Simon Winchester’s account of its genesis. However, I have had no involvement with the latter, whose author’s qualities are well known to readers of his previous books, most relevantly The Surgeon of Crowthorne, and little with the former, which hardly needs ...”

“... The result is a panoramic account of 19th-century literary life. ‘Just who were these people?’ Simon Winchester asked in The Meaning of Everything, his 2003 account of the dictionary. Ogilvie follows the paper trail they left, which extends all over Britain, Europe and the Anglophone world.She arranges her chapters, in lexicographical tradition, according ...”

“... stone was laid on 18 March 1903. The official opening was on 25 June 1904. Ian Gordon and Simon Inglis’s book Great Lengths: The Historic Indoor Swimming Pools of Britain tells us that E.J. Wakeling, vice chairman of the Shoreditch Baths and Washhouses Committee, animated the occasion by plunging into the pool and swimming a 100-foot length ...”

“... the target was dramatically told ‘You’re on Candid Camera,’ to much shock and hilarity. As Bradley Clissold has argued, the success of Candid Camera can be understood in the context of Cold War anxieties over surveillance, providing a humorous release for the pressure of being or feeling watched that was an unsettling new affect in postwar ...”

“... of knickers to dry in winter.’ These are women with names like Bubble Carew-Pole and Charlotte Bradley-Hanford and Juliet Mount Charles. Women who can say things like ‘My parents chose Wycombe Abbey because it was the nearest girls’ boarding school to Harley Street,’ or ‘My parents chose Heathfield because none of the girls had spots.’ Or, ‘My ...”

“... generated in opposition a series of essays implicitly radical in their attitudes. Looking back to Bradley’s very fine, essentially liberal, praise of Falstaff, Auden’s and Empson’s essays, for instance, like Orson Welles’s film, Chimes at Midnight, make a brilliant case, in different ways, for the old knight’s generous, even loving, even saintly ...”

“... equally wrong-headed and useful. The practice is summarised in the mocking footnote we attach to Bradley: ‘How many children had Lady Macbeth?’ A similar topic, once much debated though now rarely reverted to, is: ‘How old, exactly, is Hamlet?’ The dimensions of the problem are these. The Prince is introduced to us as an undergraduate. But in the ...”

“... according to Monbiot the educational charity Sense about Science – a prominent supporter of Simon Singh in his recent dispute with the British Chiropractic Association – has a former LMer for a managing director, and another one as her deputy; the director of the Science Media Centre is Fiona Fox, a former LM contributor and younger sister of Claire ...”