“... letters to the worthies listed in Who’s Who, and that he managed to get money from the likes of Robert Maxwell, Cliff Richard and Twiggy. Since 1958 Butler had been the co-ordinator of a perennially impoverished study which began by examining the medical, social and economic circumstances of 17,000 babies born in the same week in March 1958, then over ...”

“... to convey this understanding of history: even controversial figures like the rapacious conqueror Robert Clive were enrolled in the pantheon of imperial greatness. The statue of the Bristol slave trader Edward Colston, toppled last year, was put up in 1895, though he died in 1721. But the strategy was a failure: more people learned about Colston in the 24 ...”

“... Charles Dickens, Henry James, Bram Stoker, Ulysses S. Grant, Toulouse-Lautrec, Lillie Langtry, Robert Mitchum and Jean Cocteau were also on the books. Some of their accounts are closed, crossed out with lines of red ink and marked ‘Dead’. Grand Duke Sergei of Russia’s reads ‘Assassinated’. A ‘Sundry Debtors’ list from 1909-41 fills a hundred ...”

“... begins in 1954. Modelling himself on his father, who was one of the architects of the New Deal, Robert Wagner Jr won the mayoral race promising a ‘New Deal for New York’. Reforming the city jail system was part of his vision. Just as now, jails were used to manage unemployment and instability in working-class life, with ...”

“... a Bible in a tube of sunlight’. So, all right, there is no comma here – Morrison’s editor, Robert Gottlieb, said he was always inserting commas into her sentences and she was always taking them out again – but it is not so distinctive as the word ‘tube’. Thirty-four years ago, I stopped reading, right here, to puzzle whether this should be a ...”

“... in a Ship, as well as in the State’). A good woman was ‘like a ship’, the preacher Robert Wilkinson ventured, because ‘her countenance and conversation are ballasted with soberness and gravity’ – though she ‘must not have one quality of a ship, and that is too much rigging’.Beneath the bluster, however, was hard-nosed calculation. A ...”

“... was busy with Gazza-saving schemes right to the end. Unluckily, his only source of finance was Robert Maxwell: another good reason for Sugar, Rupert Murdoch’s friend, to have moved in when he did. Irving Scholar is now seen as a typical loadsamoney illusionist of the Eighties, and is taken to be the architect of all Spurs’ financial cock-ups in that ...”

“... the potential enemy’s economic strength were based on the sort of calculation that writers like Robert Conquest have long criticised. According to a memorandum submitted by the Economic Intelligence Department of the Foreign Office in April 1946, for instance, Soviet industrial output would exceed that of the rest of Europe by 1960 and overtake that of the ...”

“... rapid technological advance, and Beadle could usefully have made more of this. The generations too young to have attended Woodstock have lived through the years of space travel, the advent of CDs and Virtual Reality, the innovations in art and design made possible by computer graphics and so on. Meanwhile, the irony of the entrenched position of rock’s ...”

“... shows his Secretary of State making an almost identical remark. It is with this episode that the young American scholar Scott Lucas, in the introduction to Divided we stand, opens his meticulously researched and pleasantly written examination of the 1956 crisis seen as a landmark in Anglo-American relations. What started as a PhD thesis has been happily ...”

“... takeovers and wished us the best of luck, while in another we were received by a team of beady young screen-watchers who might as well have been wearing tee-shirts blazoned with ‘I short-termism.’ But we still had to be sure of getting our message across as best and wherever we could. And that brought us face to face once again with the familiar ...”

“... a desperate situation to work his best, or indeed to work at all. Wordsworth made the comment that Robert Southey, Coleridge’s brother-in-law, ‘writes too much at his ease’, but the criticism could equally have applied to Wordsworth himself, not because Wordsworth found composition easy – it gave him the psychosomatic pains which only afflicted ...”

“... humanity weep at these painful separations from everything, animate and inanimate, with which the young heart has become entwined? Far from it.’ Jackson was the son of an Ulster immigrant driven out of Ireland by English injustice, and he was speaking to the sons and daughters (and grandsons and granddaughters) of other immigrants, who knew what he ...”

“... who insisted on being identified), but the key facts are the same. Essentially, it involves the young Owen taking a job as a navvy during his university vacation in the autumn of 1956, and discovering that the good old British working chap is pretty patriotic and doesn’t take kindly to being shoved around by wogs like Colonel Nasser. He records that ...”

“... an obstacle, that it would be as though I came to a wall through which I could not pass,’ the young Cage replies (as recounted in the ‘Indeterminacy’ lecture): ‘in that case I will devote my life to beating my head against that wall.’ The older Cage grins and says the wall doesn’t exist. And then we start hearing that he is the most influential ...”