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“... giant building, that high-bounding wall/Those bare-worn walks, that lofty thund’ring hall …/… a prison, with a milder name’. Still, this game of identification shows how strong the legend of the workhouse is, and how obsessive the need to commemorate an iniquity long since ended, but never completely atoned for or sufficiently deplored. We ...”

“... age. The incident is remarkable because the man was Lytton Strachey and he wasn’t joking. No Bloomsbury raspberry here. The famous debunker of eminent Victorians was handing out a bouquet to the most eminently Victorian of them all. He’d been hooked ever since he’d first seen Iolanthe in 1907. ‘It’s impossible to believe that a lord chancellor ...”

“... yet to be appreciated by Westerners.’ George Harrison and Ravi Shankar at the Royal Albert Hall on 23 September 1974. Images of Shankar – sitting cross-legged on a carpet, playing his sitar – have become synonymous with Indian classical music, yet when his story is told it too often focuses on his starry associations. Through his friendship with ...”

“... unionists and Italian Marxists were forever dropping in on his house in Spitalfields, which Stuart Hall recalled as a ‘sort of permanently open unofficial conference centre with some informal seminar always in permanent session in the kitchen’. In 1967, Samuel founded the History Workshop movement to democratise ‘the act of historical ...”

“... the story here of a previous Australian Labor leader who told Margaret Whitlam, his wife, that no one would ever get him going to South-East Asia: ‘You never know what you’ll catch.’ Mr Whitlam, by contrast, is rarely happier than when abroad. He translated the menu for me in Sofia, discoursing on the etymology of some of its words, recommended a ...”

“... institutions are debated more widely and more knowledgeably. Both Jonathan Steele’s book and John Gray’s essay sharpen a critique which has so far been fragmentary and diffuse. They articulate deeply-felt arguments against the type of reform Russia is undergoing and warn of the dangers of social upheaval if it continues in the same way. Both writers ...”

“... all but impossible for anyone other than the very wealthy, with a property bubble that ‘shows no signs of abating’. The images they use to illustrate this are two advertisements on the Tube: ‘Dystopia 1: London as Theme Park’ is an ad for the Oyster card that shows a skyline full of helter-skelters and ferris wheels; ‘Dystopia 2: London as ...”

“... Among other certain things (death, taxes etc) is the rule that no work of science fiction will ever win the Booker Prize – not even the joke 1890s version. H.G. Wells’s The Time Machine had no chance against ‘literary’ authors like Hardy and Conrad. In the twenty-five years it has been running, no SF title, as I recall, has even been shortlisted for Martyn Goff’s real thing ...”

“... Both here and in his earlier study of the Edinburgh Review and his first volume on Macaulay, John Clive shows no desire to use or manipulate the Victorians. He merely wants to understand them better. And what he comes to understand, as G.M. Young did before him, is that the Victorian resolutely refuses to behave in the ...”

“... threat that, unless concessions were made to it, the PCF might run up the red flag over City Hall; the revision absolved the PCF of all responsibility should, for example, any Trotskyites among the marchers try to take matters into their own hands. The authorities, in their turn, would have responded within this well-understood, if unstated ...”

“... The Reading Room of the British Museum is now completed, and if London had nothing but this hall of the blessed, scholars would make it well worth their while to make a pilgrimage here. All the sorrows of the outside would disappear in the mighty rotunda, and it is so quiet in this region of the eternal spirits that one can follow a thought into one’s inmost recesses ...”

“... in pastry, sixpence for the best kind of goose. But price and value were now distant relations. No one knew what things should cost, and market manipulation was rife. William Cokke, carrying some corn in his hand for show, walked round Newgate market talking loudly about the outrageous price of wheat, which he claimed could not be got for less than 21 pence ...”

“... New York is no longer a city of five boroughs with a village at its centre. The latest report of the US Conference of Mayors describes it as a megacity, with the metropolitan area absorbing surrounding counties in New Jersey and New York State. This is a city with a population of 18 million and a GDP of $1 trillion, just a little lower than Spain’s ...”

“... would turn Northern Ireland into an ‘economic semi-colony of the EU’ and damage the union. ‘No British Conservative government could or should sign up to it.’ There was every reason to disbelieve him, but the delegates stomped and cheered. He promised to spend billions on a bridge from Scotland to Co. Antrim – they believed that too.After ...”

“... long been an oasis. It was opened as a public park in 1958. Its scandals are old scandals and have no bearing on the current frenzy for makeovers, peppery paths, wooden obstacles for training circuits, laminated heritage notices. Spanking new carpets are woven for clapped-out football pitches, changing rooms erected to replace shower blocks opened in the dark ...”