“... media friendly, discounts to TV crews who look like TV crews. The Paramount is clearly the joint John Lanchester’s characters allude to in The Debt to Pleasure. ‘Bed, sheets, fittings, lamps, lightbulbs – all black ... I stayed in a flash hotel in New York that was a bit like that.’ The cab-summoners, out on the street, in long torpedo coats and wool ...”

“... moment was perhaps the publication, while Skinner was an undergraduate, of a scholarly edition of John Locke’s Two Treatises of Government by Peter Laslett. Laslett showed how radically Locke’s text had been misunderstood because of the ignorance of political scientists about, and their indifference to, the circumstances and aims of its ...”

“... of India: within these loosely-defined parameters were situated schools such as Cathedral and John Connon as well as Campion, colleges like Elphinstone and St Xavier’s, the important office buildings that belonged both to the Government and to private companies, the Bombay Gymkhana club, and the Jaslok and Breach Candy Hospitals. This was where not only ...”

“... of lines. ‘The duty of every honest American/is to emigrate.’ ‘Recycling has grown to be/a major part of the pollution industry.’ The face on the Carcanet cover is a deeply scored calligraphy of experience, framed by rock-starish lightly silvered hair and reflective shades, behind which eyes that miss nothing flick from side to side, tracking through ...”

“... as a nationalist alternative. Nothing exemplified the new political culture more tellingly than John McGrath’s play The Cheviot, the Stag and the Black, Black Oil (1973), which the 7:84 theatre company took on tour round Scotland. The play itself was impeccably socialist; but audiences were more alert to its unintended nationalist message. Indeed, there ...”

“... him almost painfully eager not to fall into this trap. Not for Brown the ghastly contortions of John Prescott, happy to scourge the Tories for their failings as husbands and fathers in the dog days of the Major administration, but equally happy to try it on himself when a comely employee fell his way. Yet this sort of ...”

“... using fMRI – notably, Semir Zeki – have pointed art studies in a significant new direction. John Onians and Barbara Maria Stafford, both art historians, certainly think so, though Neuroarthistory and Echo Objects argue the case in quite different ways. What might the far view be, from this new bend in the road? Suppose we could arrive at adequate ...”

“... knew how to strongarm a vote and how to hold a grudge. He was a rival to the stylish, charismatic John F. Kennedy, but as his running mate was vital to JFK’s election in 1960; the alliance brought him to power after Kennedy’s assassination in 1963. Kennedy’s death more or less ensured that Johnson would be elected the following year, but when he ...”

“... He proceeded to displace Charles. The authors now digress in order to consolidate one of the major themes of the book. Benton was the son and grandson of Congressmen from Missouri. Theodore Roosevelt had written his grandfather’s biography. In spite of the social differences, there were parallels between Benton’s upbringing and Pollock’s. In both ...”

“... Militant, feminist groups, black groups, the UDM/Eric Hammond ‘realists’, CND, and, in all the major cities, a whole series of strongly differentiated local party factions. The fundamental mistake in Hilary Wainwright’s book is that she mistakes this fragmentation – a sort of slow dying – for a new birth. The two parties of her title are ...”

“... and don’t on the whole seem to care, what is being kept from us. That is rather special; and a major factor, claims David Vincent in this path-breaking book, in our governance. It can have ludicrous effects. One was the refusal to acknowledge that we had any ‘secret services’: until recently, MI5 and MI6 had no official existence. Questions about them ...”

“... isn’t all downhill, however. In the last 15 years considerable resources have been committed to major resignalling projects. Signals, which were once manually operated, are now controlled from integrated electronic centres using Automatic Route-Setting (ARS) and Solid State Interlocking (SSI). ARS sets the routes according to a pre-loaded timetable and SSI ...”

“... and the nationalist politician, Shintaro Ishihara (the newly elected Governor of Tokyo), had a major success in Japan with their book The Japan that Can Say No, in which they urged a strengthening of the national ‘fibre’ and greater independence from the influences and pressures of the United States. A few years later this spawned China Can Say No, a ...”

“... inside the biographer like a spider’s thread; a critical study which exceeds in wordage all the major works of its subject put together ... ‘On n’arrête pas Voltaire,’ de Gaulle said of Sartre in 1968; and perhaps those down at Gallimard imagined they heard a pun. One does not arrest Voltaire ... and you can’t stop him either. Who started ...”

“... themselves, or to priests or nurses, while the heroic surgeon sawed on. Half a century ago, John Alfred Ryle, the founder of social medicine, declared that one of the mistakes of scientific medicine was to have shelved the problem of pain. With both clinical and humane ends in mind, he called for fresh study. Since then things have indeed improved, but ...”