“... roaring through. Glasman wants to ensnare capitalism in local associations that give people some powers of resistance against the moneymen. His rather clunky name for this is ‘democratic micro-entanglement’. The other problem with liberalism, and the reason it is no good at this sort of micro-politics, is that liberals have a fatal weakness for ...”

“... of Under the Volcano), and he also gives us Lowry’s magnificently pugnacious, colossal letter to Jonathan Cape, composed in furious response to a standard request for cuts and revisions to the manuscript of the novel. This communication has rightly been described by Lowry’s biographer Gordon Bowker as ‘probably the most subtle and revealing letter ever ...”

“... as wars proper, and call for a ‘humanitarian pacifist’ intervention on the part of the Western powers – and direct attacks on the US or other representatives of the new global order, in which case, again, we do not have wars proper, but merely ‘unlawful combatants’ resisting the forces of universal order. In this second case, one cannot even imagine ...”

“... on Nottingham architecture. The general effect is excellent; once again Johnson proves that his powers as a writer can withstand his quixotic attempt to overcome the hated restrictions imposed on his truth-telling by the odious convention of binding up paper, each page in its due and boring order, into artefacts known as books. Formal experimentation ...”

“... at the Folklore Society said Lang had jumbled up genuinely ancient tales with the work of Jonathan Swift and the French fabulists, whose fairies and giants were merely their own inventions. Yet this was a literary not a scientific venture, one less interested in curating immemorial fragments than in showing readers what it was like to think with ...”

“... courage or the luck – from a project one had taken to be one’s own. ‘A courageous person,’ Jonathan Lear has suggested, ‘has a proper orientation towards what is shameful and what is fearful.’ We tend to think of giving up, in the ordinary way, as a lack of courage, as an improper or embarrassing orientation towards what is shameful and ...”

“... echo of this imperfectly acknowledged transformation in the more avowedly Marxist work of Jonathan Dollimore. In his absorbing book Radical Tragedy Dollimore made free use of the term ‘essentialism’, meaning the ascription of a permanent, necessary form to reality. He wrote, in a way which still seems bizarre to me, as if Karl Popper had never ...”

“... the Kincora scandal finally surfaced in the press. This had nothing to do with Wallace, but the powers-that-be, who had not wanted these skeletons out of the cupboard, were doubtless confirmed in their view that it was too dangerous to have Wallace wandering round free. Three months later Wallace was arrested, found guilty of the manslaughter of his friend ...”

“... Soldiers of Diplomacy: While waiting for the member states of the UN, and in particular the great powers, to agree on a clear and coherent philosophy on military intervention and how it should be implemented, the UN must return to the great principle that governed the creation of the Blue Helmets: to keep the peace when this is what the parties concerned ...”

“... and prose in a 45-page anthology which has just been published. Meanwhile Mr Patten, who has no powers to control university entrance, has urged vice-chancellors to stop admitting students whose spelling and grammar are not up to scratch. Lady Blatch, a junior education minister, has called on school examining boards to exclude television programmes from ...”

“... a private investigator called Glenn Mulcaire with violations of the Regulation of Investigatory Powers Act 2000. After pleading guilty, both men received short prison sentences in January 2007. That might easily have been the end of the matter. A number of high-ranking officers in the Met had personal and financial links with News International ...”

“... a mean sucker’) is just one of the noir conventions Kelman revels in sending up. The sleuth’s powers of deductive reasoning are mercilessly mocked: ‘I saw his eyes in the rearview mirror, studying me. There was a chance he was a writer’; ‘I noticed the guy reading the newspaper, he looked like Franco’s politics would have been okay by ...”

“... interested in his own place in the firmament’. According to Blair’s chief of staff, Jonathan Powell, McGuinness tended to defer to Adams. If McGuinness was ever negotiating alone he would say he needed to discuss a proposal with Adams. Adams, in similar circumstances, sometimes kept his own counsel. In June 2004 Adams ‘very ...”

“... to target. In Move Fast and Break Things, his polemic against the ‘digital-age robber barons’, Jonathan Taplin points to an analysis on Buzzfeed: ‘In the final three months of the US presidential campaign, the top-performing fake election news stories on Facebook generated more engagement than the top stories from major news outlets such as the New York ...”

“... presence’; and he wonders aloud whether for such a man a love-life was possible. Raymond’s powers of withdrawal, his lack of close friends, his absence of hilarity or gregariousness ... must have made him a terribly matter-of-fact father and husband; he couldn’t possibly have been a lover. His massive pipe was scarcely [sic] out for a start – the ...”