“... Opponents of this analysis – notably Matthew Goodwin, whose Revolt on the Right (written with Robert Ford) first identified Ukip voters as older and poorer than the general population – argue that the Leave/Remain faultline is essentially a cultural one. Among working-class voters identified as former or potential Labour supporters, the divisive issue ...”

“... itself took the form of a collection of pensées) are clearly a labour of love. Auden may have needed the money – he mostly wrote prose in the winter in New York to finance summers writing poetry in Europe – but he evidently took pride in his facility and his craftsmanship. Robert Lowell responded with a ...”

“... and cosy corner-shop atmosphere: exterminate and replace them. The mastermind behind Crown was Robert Haft, a Harvard Business School graduate who had written his master’s thesis on retail discounting. Crown’s philosophy, as displayed on South Lake, was predatory. Find an existing profitable outlet, set up alongside it, discount the neighbour into ...”

“... lowest public profile. (How many spy novels can you think of that feature ‘sigint’, aside from Robert Harris’s Enigma?) Yet today it is probably the most important, and certainly the most expensive. It is housed in Cheltenham in ‘the largest building ever initiated by the British government’. The building is shaped like a doughnut, which is the ...”

“... given environment. Philosophers have typically taken this to show that biological generalisations may be valuable in prediction and explanation, but they are not true laws because they have exceptions. Mitchell takes it to show that we need to revise our account of what laws are: on her view, a law is a principle that can be used effectively in explanation ...”

“... I will not tolerate comparison with Bentley. Bentley is alone and supreme.’ However, ‘they may compare me with Porson if they will.’ He was willing, that is, to be compared only with the runner-up for the title of greatest English classical scholar. Ordinary readers, even if they have a bit of Latin, can have little notion of what it means to know it ...”

“... lose to a bunch of pirates? The phenomenon certainly seems to demand an explanation, though there may be more than one. Wood starts with a broad perspective and narrows down steadily to the events of 14 October itself, though these must remain largely unknowable. She sketches out the history of the earlier 11th century, made confusing above all by the habit ...”

“... of dinosaurs in three little words: ‘big, fierce, extinct’. The first and third concepts may be causally related: it may be that dinosaurs no longer have any expanse in time because they had such a great expanse in space; they may have become extinct because they were ...”

“... of news creation and distribution. Like everything associated with him (including, one may predict, his imminent disappearance from the scene), it has happened very fast. He is 31 years old, and has been in full-time business three years. He was born in Washington DC, the offspring of ‘liberal’ parents: his father, as Matt recalls, was ‘one ...”

“... Organisation of Apocryphal Power, run by a fiendish translator named Ermes Marana, whose purpose may or may not be the subversion of fiction itself. The OAP is vaguely reminiscent of Thomas Pynchon’s underground postal service, the Tristero System, and almost certainly has covert links with Buñuel’s Revolutionary Army ...”

“... they are, with protests and complaints, converted into publicity. It’s something the media may have learnt from the old stockyards, in which none of the pig was wasted. My intention in this book was to be hard, to abandon rhetorical flourishes and keep myself to direct statement. I don’t think I’ve ever written a book with so many simple ...”

“... the novelist will have to withdraw? I do not think so: love and crime have more in common than may appear at first sight. Love is one of the revolutionary forces of modern times: in its intense and individualistic form, it has increasingly subverted the preoccupation with prestige and property that once governed marriage and, indeed, society as a whole. It ...”

“... supported by Futility, does not seem a strong enough base on which to rebuild a reputation. It may even reinforce the old view that Gerhardie was no more than a quite interesting and rather peculiar kind of failure. In fact, everybody interested in good novels should read him. I speak as a new convert, for although I read Futility forty years ago I knew ...”

“... problems of causation. Is there a collection of social or institutional preconditions which may be shown to account for it? If there is, then serious research needs to be done on Scottish government and society in the early 18th century, for the understanding of both of these remains limited. We ought also to be looking critically at the intellectual ...”

“... mid-life reaction-to-the-reactionary. After all, the world has seen such things before; remember Robert Frost’s ‘I never dared be radical when young/For fear it would make me conservative when old.’ In fact, however, it is nothing of the sort. Norris is a passionately engaged radical critic of the Anglo-American Establishment. It is precisely because ...”