“... verbal structure and are no more important as beings than are the animates in ‘The house that Jack built’. In other stories there are characters with such names as Prism, Grippe, and Poche, who are put on elaborate display, but who are really no more than figures in a comedy of humours. Ms Gallant does not seem to rub elbows with her Parisians, as Joyce ...”

“... keep we her? – The Grecians keep our aunt. Is she worth keeping? – Why, she is a pearl Whose price hath launch’d above a thousand ships, and it is perfectly clear that ‘her’ and ‘she’ refer to Helen throughout. If Kenneth Palmer had retained the Folio colon after ‘aunt’, it would be necessary to explain in a note that the first ...”

“... thing that is not, quite. Getting some things wrong (or only essentially right) was probably the price he paid for getting some hugely important things right – the nature of totalitarianism, for instance. The struggle to get that vision of evil across, to give it very sharp definition, may be what led him to dogmatic excess or distortion in lesser ...”

“... Bull spirit. The Communist Party, which was strong on the docks in those times and had the famous Jack Dash as its hate-figure, took the day off and later tried to organise a conciliatory East End meeting addressed by the concerned priesthood. But this is to get ahead of the story somewhat.Like most such ‘years’, 1968 began a few months early. Premonitory ...”

“... films we have experienced. And it’s not where we were when we heard about the assassination of Jack Kennedy, but what we were watching: television. Home alone, or straining the neck to look at a wall-mounted set in a half-empty restaurant, we were in thrall to waveringly remote prints of reality. Meanwhile, on the same afternoon, the nominated ...”

“... Cockney Tom, New Haven Baldy, Detroit Fatty, Philadelphia Slim, Pennsylvania Dutch, Three-Fingered Jack and so on. Whenever they acquired a little money, the men quickly drank it away, but to Davies – who as a child used to be given mulled beer, rather than cocoa, at bedtime – that was to their credit: teetotallers, he says, ‘lack the sympathy and ...”

“... that ‘this is basically a working-class Barbican, and if it were in EC1 rather than SE28 the price of a flat would be astronomical.’ Hatherley waxes eloquent on its central ‘unbelievably long interconnected block’, praises it for being ‘flood-proof and still architecturally cohesive’, and pours scorn on those ‘hack directors’ – Stanley ...”

“... West Asian/North African – belonging to the two major branches which the social anthropologist Jack Goody has taught us to recognise, the African and the Eurasian. Therborn prefers a ‘geocultural’ division to one based on religion, since, as he sees it, geoculture generally prevails. Hindu and Muslim family practices in North India are similar but ...”

“... Early on, they single out their adversaries as, pre-eminently, Shula Marks, Geoff Berridge and Jack Spence. ‘For some scholars, no doubt, archival work is logistically too difficult or temperamentally uncongenial. Such must survive by their theorising, and hope to invent a concept which catches on. But history is too important to be left to the ...”

“... Historically Minded Trump (on how he would deal with terrorists, invoking General ‘Black Jack’ Pershing in the Philippines, 1909-13): ‘They were having terrorism problems, just like we do. And he caught fifty terrorists who did tremendous damage and killed many people. And he took the fifty terrorists, and he took fifty men and he dipped fifty ...”

“... in 1938, elevating the practical necessity to a theoretical maxim. Still, they would exact a price, as Orwell saw in Spain. Everywhere, Fronczak argues, the Popular Front represented a worldwide left-wing identity, as particular ideologies of nationalism and sectarianism suddenly became compatible.Communists and their sympathisers gained a new popularity ...”

“... that got us to where we are today, that a global free market has no sentimental bias for the Union Jack – by ignoring it. The global free market is treated as a kind of endless cricket match that a Britain outside the EU – seen through Faragist goggles – is doomed to win. Ignoring the bug is hard for Rees-Mogg because of his curious duality as, on the ...”

“... if not the precise belief that ‘to be human is to be English,’ turns up a little later in Jack London’s ‘The Unparalleled Invasion’. Here the ‘disgusting ocean of life’ that is China is drained by means of diseases dropped in glass tubes from the air. The yellow hordes try to escape infection, but the Western powers terminate their frantic ...”

“... was a fishmonger. In the early 1920s he had had an offer from a friend in the film industry, Jack Hyams, to become a partner. Had he accepted he’d have owned a large share in Gaumont-British, but he hadn’t been prepared to take the risk of moving into unknown territory. Within his familiar trade he had done reasonably well in a modest way, owning two ...”

“... weapons sales; even Bernie Sanders agreed. The cut in supply would mean an increase in the price of crude oil – indeed, OPEC spokespeople said this was its purpose – and that would, as Sanders put it, ‘jack up US gas prices’. It was under Biden that the US once again became the world’s largest oil and ...”