“... this injustice was to become a central element of suffragette demonstrations.) She was praised by her tutor as ‘industrious and painstaking’. She began teaching and writing plays and journalism in London, and in 1906 joined the WSPU, the Women’s Social and Political Union, but her independent – and extreme – militancy caused a breach. In the ...”

“... were uncertain about the future. Both regimes had effectively emptied formal politics of meaning by banning any party that had real popular appeal and restricting others to the status of a loyal opposition, thus depriving itself of intermediaries between the state and its citizens who could have negotiated an end to the crisis. Both countries’ supposed ...”

“... Pauline Kael took against the rainbow at the end of David Lean’s film Doctor Zhivago. It was a ‘disgraceful effect’, she said, ‘a coarse gesture of condescension and appeasement to the Russians’, and she asked if Lean and Robert Bolt would have placed a rainbow ‘over the future of England’. Actually it’s difficult to think of David Lean placing rainbows anywhere much, and more significantly, the mood of the rainbow, if not the actual image, is fully there in Boris Pasternak’s novel, as Russian as you can get ...”

“... a modern nation-state – from the political order that, with nostalgic affection, would come to be thought of as the “Old Republic”.’ Emerson had been a late convert to abolitionism and the passions that drove a determined group of his fellow New Englanders to prod the conscience of the Old Republic to live up to the professed goals of its founding ...”

“... attitude towards integration and in its interaction with Muslims. ‘British values’ began to be evoked: integration no longer cut it. The wearing of the headscarf, historically never something politicians had worried about, rose to become a national policy concern and was seen as not only un-British, but as a state security concern. In 2015 ...”

“... her instincts. Now he’s twice her size and they live in a state of armed truce, punctuated by fights and chases, with jealously defended sleeping areas, much as the children do. My son sides with the male, who’s nominally his and, like him, can’t be trusted around certain foods. My daughter sides with the ...”

“... in the evening, doing a chip shop in between. I got to know all the women. They were presided over by a series of delinquent janitors. (One of them was running guns for Ulster. Another stole video equipment. The older one was a kiddie-fiddler etc.) I used to go after school to help my mum with the mopping and use the library. During the summer holidays, they ...”

“... seagull there, a wingspan from something prehistoric. You didn’t need to know what it was, or to be reminded of the albatross’s association with luck or guilt or human burden, or even to understand how far this one must have travelled, to see the majesty and melancholy in the creature’s remains. This was Coleridge’s harmless bird ‘that loved the man ...”

“... biggest invasion in human history, dwarfing even the Normandy landings. In this case, D-Day was to be 1 November 1945. An American army of five million men was to be assembled for the invasion of Japan, with smaller but still significant contingents from Britain, Australia and the rest of the Commonwealth. Despite an ...”

“... The Maxim Gorky, a giant airliner built with money raised by the Union of Soviet Writers and Editors in 1934, was like nothing that had gone before it. The wings of the Tupolev-designed plane had a span of more than sixty metres, the same as a Boeing 747’s. It was driven by eight massive engines, generating between them 7000 horsepower ...”

“... with the West slowly but steadily eroded the ideological cohesiveness of the Soviet elites and by the time The Gulag Archipelago was published in the West in the mid-1970s, Soviet Communism had already lost what little intellectual cachet it had left in Europe. Both Russian and American culture were warped and disfigured ...”

“... of black people in South African squatter towns and “resettlement camps”’. Less burdened by spurious universalism – ‘Man becomes Everyman (that bore)’ – it was a more particularised novel of witness. The trouble was that by making the hapless, drifting Michael the representative of the victims of ...”

“... English-speaking culture and (even more) education. Books on familiar subjects continue to be written, and to find publishers and – presumably – readers. One of the five, indeed, is offered with the sole justification – outdated by the time the book appeared – that no biography of Pompey exists in ...”

“... of the well at the bottom of which were your origins. You could taste what child’s play used to be like in the semi-countryside just beyond the boundaries of suburban settlement. This was surely one of the most interesting programmes that Clive James could have seen in the course of his duties as the Observer’s television critic, but he did not have much ...”

“... made no checks, and it recounts many events of which I had no direct knowledge, it seems to me to be as accurate as one can expect of so personal a record. I am struck with admiration that anyone should undertake – on top of the heavy load of a Cabinet Minister and a Member of Parliament – the additional burden of recording each day’s events on the ...”