“... about being driven in this way was easy. Much discussed of late has been her second novel, The Price of Salt, the odd, nervy, yet surprisingly potent lesbian love story she managed to publish – despite crippling fears that it would destroy her reputation were its authorship to become known – under the pseudonym Claire Morgan in 1952. Virtually ignored ...”

“... luxury [that] played to every Western European stereotype … about the decadent Orient’, as Richard Miles puts it in his impressive new history of Carthage. Pointing out that Rome’s triumph over Carthage ‘provided an attractive blueprint’ and ‘metaphor’ to justify French domination in North Africa, Miles dismisses Salammbô as ‘the most ...”

“... excluded from the New Deal and Fair Deal. White anger later found a grim and calculating ally in Richard Nixon, with his ‘Southern strategy’, his appeals to the ‘silent majority’ and his calls for ‘law and order’ in America’s cities.Yet no American president has so flagrantly pandered to white grievance as Donald Trump, even as he has praised ...”

“... war is over, come the ‘profiteers’. There is a letter to the Times inquiring closely into the price of rhubarb and cabbages. ‘A few clean-run British officers with plenary powers would very soon set things right’ in that quarter. And when either middlemen or retailers are discovered to be making more than a fair profit we should ‘clap the offenders ...”

“... at a once familiar corner. Part of it was gone. The Walgreen’s drug store where, as teenagers, Richard and I had tormented Louie, was gone, replaced by a huge, white, faceless department store, as was the jewellers where I had stood for hours desperately wanting those hideous rings with heavy red and purple stones in them. In almost every other way ...”

“... detriment to his nation’s labouring classes. But when English bourgeois radicals like Burgh, Price, Priestley and even Paine advocated a minimal state organised around an enterprising and enlightened middle class, the implications for the working classes were likely to be less benign. A successful cult of enrichez-vous might indeed challenge the power of ...”

“... remains highly centralised, the KGB has strengthened its position, critics continue to pay a high price for nonconformity. Whatever the new atmosphere, there have been nothing like the radical reforms seen, for example, in China. Such scepticism has a point. While Gorbachev’s demand for change has been insistent, the practical measures taken to date have ...”

“... at the end of his Wars of the Roses tetralogy: while Henry VII may have been as murderous as Richard III, he was nothing like as charming. Francis Bacon was ready to praise Henry’s politic wisdom in the 1622 biography that was to frame perceptions of the king until late in the 20th century, but he could not disguise the ...”

“... of the absurd – swelled up and burst in the 1900s, and salaams have been performed in front of Richard Olney’s Simple French Food by some of the most precious amateurs in New York and London. (Oddly, when so many food books of little worth are published here – the unspeakable in pursuit of the edible – this frugally illustrated, decently produced ...”

“... popworld of Beavis and Butthead and the fortysomething editors who deify Rosanne Arnold and Richard Nixon on the same page. Editors once made yearly scouting trips up to the North Country, just to avoid getting sucked into the black hole of fad and revisionism. These trips, which took place in the spring and always in a four-wheel-drive ...”

“... a little help from his partners in Opec) secured a threefold increase in the international oil price, from 9 to 27 dollars a barrel. In consequence, he has a little breathing space, despite the disaster of the floods. Chávez has also given a few flamboyant signals. During his first month in office he sent a friendly note to the distinguished Venezuelan in ...”

“... and leading news correspondents Crane met in Cuba such as Charles Michelson, Ernest McCready and Richard Harding Davis. These are rich materials but at the same time they are incomplete and sparse. Crane was not a prolific letter-writer and he left no diaries or memoir. Further confusing matters was Crane’s first biographer, Thomas Beer, whose Stephen ...”

“... letters supposedly showing Parnell’s complicity in the Phoenix Park murders had been forged by Richard Pigott. The Commission Report did seem to support the Tory case that Irish agrarian violence had been in part because of, and not in spite of, the Land League’s advocacy of non-violent action. But after the Pigott debacle who was ready to make capital ...”

“... The Road to Serfdom had been published three years earlier, the organisation believed that the price of victory had been too high. Democratic Western societies – notably the United States – had won the war by aping the economic tactics of their geopolitical rivals, including the Soviet Union: central planning, market controls, massive government ...”

“... side of that trade, as they say in the business – were the Russian population, for whom the price of bread went up while salaries and pensions stagnated. The first seven or eight years of nickel-and-diming the wealth of the nation into their pockets put Menatep and a few other banks in position for the truly big play. This came in 1995, when Vladimir ...”