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“... of their ordinary lives, and I’m afraid that this makes them irresistible to the novelist.’ Wells Tower demonstrates a similar affinity in his collection of short stories, Everything Ravaged, Everything Burned. Tower’s Americans are not so grandly freakish as O’Connor’s, but they are poor freaks in ...”

“... novel Sunflower features fictional versions of two small men with big names: little H.G. Wells is one; little Lord Beaverbrook is the other. Beaverbrook is one of the surprises of this unfinished novel. The other surprise is Rebecca West herself. Sunflower is a book about falling in and out of love: it reveals that while West was having her ...”

“... proudly flying its Jolly Roger, is a coffin-sized craft belonging to a researcher called Mike Wells. He has made it his business, despite numerous brushes with security guards and large dogs, to record and report every stage of the recent enclosures. He helped to commission two substantial scientific reports on the actual (rather than the ...”

“... existence, though they have lost their bohemian character. This was also the period when the White Tower ranked high among London restaurants. One of my acquaintances became a partner in the White Tower, only to become a professional diplomat when the war ended. I find other forgotten names in Maclaren-Ross’s book. One of ...”

“... of flight. In the year of Blériot the Count de Lambert flew over Paris and circled the Eiffel Tower at 300 metres. If King Kong had climbed the Tower Parisians could not have been more excited. It is true that Santos-Dumont had done the same thing in a dirigible in 1901, but the Count’s feat was the equivalent of a ...”

“... Fiction landscape, that of the ‘drowned world’ of the middle future, where the abandoned tower blocks of Melbourne stick up out of the sea, and archaeologist-historians ponder on the strange lives of the people who lived in them before the ‘greenhouse effect’ took hold, melted the ice caps, and loosed the overpopulated 21st century’s shaky grip ...”

“... Syndrome consists of Rapunzel herself, the wicked witch or magician who has imprisoned her, the tower she is imprisoned in, and the Rescuer, a ‘handsome prince of little substantiality who provides momentary escape’. The Rapunzel Syndrome was doubtless present, though submerged in some very different story-material, in Atwood’s earlier fictions. In ...”

“... Glass happened on her lab specimens – who did have the means.Prospecting a hundred years, H.G. Wells wrote: ‘The London citizen of the year 2000 AD may have a choice of nearly all England and Wales south of Nottingham and east of Exeter as his suburb.’ He was right – but only partly right, there are no absolutes here. What he and William ...”

“... to communicate with the explorer Peary, then in the Arctic, projecting unspecified rays from his tower at Wardenclyffe in a direction slightly west of due north, had mistaken his aim by a small but fatal angle, causing the beam to miss Peary’s base at Ellesmere Island, cross the Polar region over into Siberia, and hit the Stony Tunguska instead. Reading ...”

“... And what pictures those of Mr Kersting are. If one needs to be seduced into visiting Cleeve, or Wells, or Norbury, or St Mawes, or Astbury, or Abbey Dore, or Caerphilly, or Kells, or Caerlaverock, or Threave, these photographs make such places (among numerous others) irresistible. Mr Kersting is superb, and Mr Platt comes close to matching him. My ...”

“... being driven, is their inevitable theme, passivity their motive force. The new one, The Key of the Tower, does the trick over again – doing it over again is the trick, after all. We start with the narrator driving his car through a rainstorm. It’s a modest Mini, but already the writing is anticipating an upgrade. The labouring windscreen wipers ...”

“... apartment, lies a much larger square, many times the size of ours. Its central feature is a bell tower 115 metres high, one of the tallest in France. The structure was weakened by repeated lightning strikes and in the 18th century the top fell off during a hurricane. It was restored just before the Franco-Prussian War. Lately down-and-outs have found shelter ...”

“... illnesses. People got belly-aches and died from eating rotten fruit, the water ran out in the wells, a couple of pine forests burned down, and the dry grass on the steppes caught alight. At night, the horizon was red, and there were acrid fumes in the air. We kept getting new visitors to the morgue. The authorities announced that the water was ...”

“... ABK nevertheless submitted a design for a grand circus, culminating in a spiky, asymmetrical tower; it had no references to the style of the original gallery (a rather wan classicism), but tried to continue its use of civic, ceremonial approaches. The Prince of Wales, when Ahrends presented the project to him, wasn’t interested in ‘the plans, routes ...”

“... common since the Edwardian years. The two-and-a-half-inch layer of soil is watered from artesian wells under the building. Immensely detailed and scholarly, surprising and sometimes amusing, the Survey of London is more readable than most popularisations of architectural history – many of which must depend on it for their information. England’s smallest ...”