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“... Klein and Pettis hark back to the classic study of imperialism published by the British economist John Hobson in 1902, in the wake of the Boer War. Hobson’s work inspired Lenin’s understanding of the First World War as an outgrowth of imperialist competition but, unlike Lenin, Hobson refused to accept that financial rivalry must inevitably lead to ...”

“... and envol drapings – and in the excess of fabric: 18 metres for just one outfit. The designer John Cavanagh sat through the show ‘transfixed … in tears. The relief was overwhelming; the relief of seeing total beauty again.’ The government sent Madge Garland to Paris with £1000 to procure samples for British designers to copy. Garland had been ...”

“... material of the book could just as well have formed the basis of a very different sort of work. John Betjeman picked up on this odd and wholly characteristic ambivalence when he wrote to congratulate him: ‘When I read the book it seemed to me so rockingly funny that nothing else would seem funny again.’Decline and Fall is one of a number of Waugh’s ...”

“... in the 1990s was self-imposed. But as Georgina Born makes clear in her definitive analysis of the John Birt and Greg Dyke eras, the consistent impetus came from government. It’s no surprise that Margaret Thatcher wanted to take on the BBC – if anything, the surprise is how long it took her. (In her first term, Thatcher’s main concern was with BBC ...”

“... Wilkin, who printed almost all of her works; and the one-time Oxford philosopher and theologian John Norris, who encouraged her thinking and who in 1695 published their Letters Concerning the Love of God, thus saving Astell’s letters to him from the abyss into which much of her correspondence fell. Her opening letter, written on 21 September 1693 when she ...”

“... murder and atrocious cruelty were European monopolies. A look into Aztec or Mayan history, or into John Roscoe’s early 20th-century history of the Buganda kingdom, will correct any such error. What seems to have been a specially European capacity, from the early medieval period, was the resort to instant, frantic aggression as ‘shock and awe’ to break an ...”

“... We are living through a great era of saint-making. Under John Paul II an industrial revolution has overtaken the Vatican, an age of mass production. Saints are fast-tracked to the top, and there are beatifications by the bucket-load. It seems a shame to have all the virtues required for beatification, but not to get your full name in the Catholic Almanac Online ...”

“... but was a blockbuster bestseller, popping to number one on the fiction list just ahead of John le Carré’s The Spy Who Came in from the Cold. We shall never see the noble likes of such bestseller lists again. Twenty years after his debut with Dangling Man (1944), after an already notable run that included The Adventures of Augie March (his ...”

“... Prix of the fastest, whitest drugs available. He brushed aside compatriots/competitors like Elton John and called Mick Jagger the ‘sort of harmless bourgeois kind of evil one can accept with a shrug’. If pushed, this apprentice warlock could also recite Derek and Clive’s ‘The Worst Job I Ever Had’ by heart and generally came on like a twisted ...”

“... Kaplan’s Dreaming in French: The Paris Years of Jacqueline Bouvier Kennedy, Susan Sontag and Angela Davis (2012) – highly recommended. From Paris, it was on to New York. Meeting Partisan Review’s co-editor William Phillips at a party, Sontag, now a single mother living on a shoestring, got right to business: ‘How do you write a review for Partisan ...”

“... aspire to, the highest form of social belonging they could expect. Today we are witnessing what Angela McRobbie has described as a ‘neoliberal intensification of mothering’: perfectly turned out middle-class, mainly white mothers, with their perfect jobs, perfect husbands and marriages, whose permanent glow of self-satisfaction is intended to make all ...”

“... remarking that his ‘vocabulary and syntax are those of utmost abstention from waste’. John Updike referred to ‘the stirring purity’ of Kafka’s prose. Hannah Arendt, as well, wrote that his work ‘speaks the purest German prose of the century’. So although Kafka was certainly Czech, it seems that fact is superseded by his written ...”

“... for Greater Manchester’s two dozen-plus parliamentary seats are, from Lisa Nandy in Wigan to Angela Rayner in Ashton-under-Lyne, from Rebecca Long-Bailey in Salford to George Galloway in Rochdale, the politics of place are as central here as party politics.I met Gavin Grimshaw, six foot four, lean and sunburned in a Lonsdale boxing vest, in the simply ...”

“... the weeks leading up to her death she went to the police six times. A formal complaint against PC Angela Cornes, who also considered bringing charges of criminal damage against her for the broken window, was dropped for lack of evidence. Cornes was promoted to sergeant last year. Fadime’s successes in court gave her every reason to believe that her boldness ...”

“... against a 5 per cent drop in the UK).German solidarity: During the October summit at Salzburg, Angela Merkel promised Leo Varadkar that the EU’s solidarity with Ireland on the border predicament would be ‘like nothing he’d ever feel again’. Varadkar’s reaction was mixed: ‘I thought it was very reassuring but also a bit ominous.’The Irish ...”