“... Laski (Briggs’s favourite), R.H. Tawney, Denis Brogan, Eileen Power and her Cambridge husband, Michael Postan. Briggs began to read Marx and the new subject of sociology. He was drifting leftwards, remarking (after the Soviet Union had joined the Allies) that a talk on the USSR by the socialist barrister D.N. Pritt was ‘a very good antidote to rotten USA ...”

“... The foundation is controversial, but continues to receive government subsidies, including a grant of €83,000 in 2012 to digitise its archive. It is comfortable making interventions in the public arena: recently it sued the sculptor Eugenio Merino for his work Always Franco, which featured a lifesize model of Franco standing in a Coca-Cola-style ...”

“... conditions; and to invoke a right is to suppose that there’s a plausible authority which can grant or affirm the right. There is no doubt that public feelings on the matter run high (at the time he was writing, in the late 1970s, very high), and these have to be acknowledged. But abortion is not a public act; even if it offends, it does not do so in the ...”

“... veto an honour for Edward Heath or Harold Macmillan than Tory dons would veto Harold Wilson. Even Michael Foot might have slipped through as a representative of the old order, a Thirties-ish, literary champion of the supremacy of Parliament, who caused offence mainly by mistaking the Cenotaph for the Aldermaston March. But Tony Benn of Westminster School and ...”

“... As charm is to Cary Grant, awkwardness to Jerry Lewis, vulnerability to Montgomery Clift, so malevolence is to Dennis Hopper. Very few actors specialised as Hopper did in convincing malice. Vincent Price was too camp to be really alarming, even as the witchfinder general. Peter Lorre was heartbreaking as a child murderer ...”

“... motion to be made standing between him and his taking of the oath.’ The leader of the House, Sir Michael Hicks-Beach, rose to object. The speaker silenced him, reminding him that Hicks-Beach had himself not yet taken the oath. And that was the end of it. What is so remarkable is that Bradlaugh took the oath, which is precisely what he had sought not to do at ...”

“... and a commercial artist. Having completed his national service in the RAF he used his demob grant to study at St Martin’s School of Art, going on to the Royal College of Art on a scholarship. After working in the kitchen at the newly opened Royal Festival Hall in 1951 – he’d begun by mopping floors but was soon roped into skinning a heap of sole ...”

“... Mickey at story meetings’; until 1946 Disney also voiced him, in falsetto. In another new Life, Michael Barrier’s The Animated Man, the studio head is seen by animators acting out ‘how a Chinese turtle should dance’, or doing ‘any of the people in the pictures, valets, anything – he all of a sudden was a valet.’ One such episode was burned in ...”

“... Cyber and television jihad are parts of the war that the former CIA analyst Michael Scheuer believes bin Laden is winning. Scheuer, whose Cassandra-isms as head of the CIA’s bin Laden unit went unheeded by the Clinton and Bush administrations before 2001, is still trying to warn America. ‘No one,’ he writes, ‘should be surprised ...”

“... administration of housing benefit – and an annual block transfer known as the Revenue Support Grant. The rest is raised locally, from council tax receipts (their size depending on the value of property in the area), rents, charges and fees (parking tickets, library fines, gym memberships) and 50 per cent of the rates levied on local businesses. Soon after ...”

“... for plenty of ideologically loaded human rights. In a recent issue of the Israel Law Review, Michael Mandel quotes a speech made by Palmiro Togliatti, the Secretary of the Italian Communist Party, in the Constituent Assembly charged with designing the new legal order: All these provisions are inspired by fear: it is feared that tomorrow there could be a ...”

“... January 1789, when it caused a sensation. When one reads it now, in this excellent new edition by Michael Sonenscher, where it appears for the first time in English alongside the other pamphlets Sieyès wrote in 1788, it is still easy to see why. It is not a beautiful or polished piece of writing, it is poorly organised and it is probably too long for what it ...”

“... of scientists on the EPA’s two advisory boards. Science research lives or dies by the government grant, but under Pruitt no member of an EPA board can receive a grant. His administration weakened rules on coal ash, smog and mercury, and cut back enforcement on toxic chemicals. ‘Pruitt has driven away hundreds of ...”

“... Names that come up in this context tend to be better known to mainstream audiences: Neil LaBute, Michael Haneke, Lars Von Trier. But it’s Nelson’s thoughts about the stuff that flickers in the middle that bears most directly on writers of memoir. The idea, for example, that if we can see the artist is suffering, that makes it OK that the artist is making ...”

“... one of the most dishonest of all modern literary forms, the official letter applying for a travel grant – for Greece in this instance. It is painful to discover that Cordier’s sculptures are connected with both colonial politics and the scientific investigation of race, which now seems so disreputable, just as it is pleasing to find that Benoist’s ...”