“... along in the mythical underbelly of America … there where it is soft and prickly, where you may rub your nose against the grainy sands of illusion and come up bleeding,’ she writes. ‘Idealism came back in style. People got along for a while’: this is the refrain she weaves throughout the story. ‘Inside the melting pot. Inside the melting ...”

“... was declared.My father wanted his first child to be a boy.Barbara Holly Goldin. Date of birth: 21 May 1946.Sex: female.Family photographs arrange themselves on the three screens, supplemented by Goldin’s more recent pictures. She tells us that Barbara started playing the piano at the age of four and taking lessons aged six. She liked to mother, and later ...”

“... the Germans established the ghetto of Theresienstadt, north of Prague (named after Empress Maria Theresa, who in 1744 issued an edict limiting the number of Jewish families in Moravia), and that the remaining Jews of Austerlitz almost certainly perished there, or later in Auschwitz, where most of the inmates of Theresienstadt were eventually taken. He might ...”

“... of), there were spots of disillusion already visible on the sunlit uplands.Five days before B-Day, Theresa Villiers, the environment secretary, standing in her wellies in a farmyard, told the BBC that the UK would not be importing chlorinated chicken or hormone-fed beef from the US or anywhere else. Both of these products are ‘illegal under EU law which we ...”

“... a ‘Great Sunday Hunt for Mrs Christie’ was organised. The Evening News advised ‘anyone who may have bloodhounds ... to bring them along’. Men should wear thick boots; women Russian boots and tweed skirts. An aeroplane flew overhead. Meanwhile the Yorkshire Police had come to suspect that a Mrs Theresa Neele, who ...”

“... grind on, its victims unheard amid the squabbling and its effects quietly naturalised as part of Theresa May’s new political settlement. Philip Hammond’s first Autumn Statement, delivered to Parliament on 23 November, confirmed that this is the ambition: none of Osborne’s major planned cuts was reversed, an overall budget surplus remains the goal ...”

“... Antigone’. It is one thing to be Antigone to one’s father, but to be Antigone to his Movement may have been a distraction for Anna as well as a destiny. Oedipus, after all, did not start a new profession. Freud managed to live virtually half his life – what he came to think of as the most significant half – without psychoanalysis. Anna lived her whole ...”

“... policy efforts to marketise by design.The second story about universities is the one that may be more familiar to those who have looked on from a distance. Across the Western world in the 1960s, campuses were crucibles of politicisation and left-wing organisation, shaping the ‘new social movements’ that followed in subsequent decades. But a ...”

“... the crisis in British (and indeed Western) society would be economic before it was political. It may yet turn out that way. For now, though, what has happened amounts to a collapse of our political system. The fact that the leadership of both main parties has disintegrated would under normal circumstances be a big story, but in the current chaos it is no ...”

“... who had abolished the corset and introduced trousers for women) and Diaghilev were close. In May 1912, Fry held an exhibition of British Modernists – Vanessa Bell, Frederick and Jessie Etchells, himself, Duncan Grant, Wyndham Lewis, Helen Saunders and some others – at the Galerie Barbazanges in Paris, which was located on the ground floor of ...”

“... To add to the comfort, the enemy has an endless capacity to blunder, and while the heroes may be unconventional – Macintyre loves all that – they are also cunning and brave and generally impervious, like comic-book characters. He delights in the codenames devised by Robertson: a fat agent is called ‘Balloon’; a womaniser with a fondness for ...”

“... Castro’s 1960 visit to the United Nations a police horse named Bangle collapsed in front of the Theresa Hotel in Harlem from a kidney ailment resulting from exhaustion – but Mr Szulc has covered Fidel’s early career with commendable tenacity. Another of Szulc’s merits is that he does not usually hedge his bets: his judgments are plain, though not ...”

“... suggests, the primary class division of 21st-century capitalism.The scale of this transformation may be overstated. The family has long been a key organisational unit of capitalist social relations; the corporation persists, and public asset managers remain more powerful than private firms; and there have always been wealthy dynasties, though profitable new ...”

“... excreta, how odd that of all the available metaphors, Boris should have chosen to describe Theresa May’s efforts to improve her EU deal as ‘like polishing a turd’. Of course Powell wasn’t the first politician to draw people’s attention to the strangeness of the immigrants pouring into their cities. The locus classicus here remains ...”

“... plates.Labour had its revenge on the Tories for the loss of the National Care Service: Theresa May’s proposal to include the value of an individual’s home in calculating their full social care costs – it currently counts only towards residential care – helped destroy her majority in the 2017 election (the media called it the ...”