“... of us adopted a proud and sterile form of internal exile, of being at least self-aware in what David Riesman calls ‘the lonely crowd’. While it may be true that there is some honour in refusing the false community on offer, if only for the sake of what Riesman calls the ‘other figures in the landscape – nature itself, the cosmos’, possibly even a ...”

“... wonderfully creased flannels’ (alas! he is fatally ‘weak-chinned’). Becoming Jean means learning a finely tuned language of discrimination. What matters are the differences between the middle classes. The lower orders (‘the plodding workers’), like the upper classes, are a race apart. Throughout the decades Pratt nervously patrols her ...”

“... Oliver’s overtures anyway, for both were committed to parliamentary reform by constitutional means. The government would not understand that, though he had no respect for corrupt figures of authority, Hone had a great deal more respect for the constitution than did the government itself or the judiciary. Over and over again, the crown and the judges ...”

“... West seemed so excited to find the Arafat era at an end. Peace is not about to break out, if peace means a binding, mutually satisfactory resolution of the ‘final status’ issues in dispute between Israel and the Palestinians: Jerusalem, refugees, sovereignty, recognised borders, settlements and water. The reason is simple: the two most powerful Middle ...”

“... of the college and had left money to fund scholarships for deserving undergraduates of limited means. One of these duly went to his great-grandson. Sterne had reason to think that he was better than his circumstances had made him. After Cambridge, he did what many intelligent young men without money would do, and became a clergyman, eased into modest ...”

“... if not beyond criticism, beyond dispraise. ‘I am not unbiased about Israel,’ he writes to David Astor in 1958, ‘I like them all, or nearly all, too well, & think that despite their faults and crimes they have developed a form of life … which is morally more attractive than any that I’ve seen elsewhere, because it is egalitarian without being ...”

“... of one of them. Among the cohort, thirsting after knowledge and high culture, were poets like David Samoilov and Boris Slutsky, future ‘enlightened bureaucrats’ like Anatoly Cherniaev, and a young Communist with a bright future, Mikhail Gorbachev, and his future wife, Raisa, both students at Moscow State University in the first half of the 1950s. Most ...”

“... historian’ that he is conveying to the open-minded reader, often burying where he means to praise. This is his first book and it has the concomitant strengths and weaknesses. It conveys boundless enthusiasm and great industry in research, but having left no stone unturned Dinshaw is at something of a loss to know what to do with the ...”

“... concerns about the work’s carbon footprint – the extraordinary scale of computation involved means that the carbon dioxide emitted in training Transformer is equivalent to 288 transatlantic flights – and about the way it looks at language. Because it is trained on text that Google harvests from the internet, its calculations reflect the way language ...”

“... figure’, which Hunter finds implausible. Like Amiel, Swire wants it both ways, which in her case means being in on the political action and having her opinions heard, but without the responsibility of an actual job.A private diary is a self-portrait, the speech delivered to the bathroom mirror, which does not always play so well outside. Swire has a ...”

“... She hit the big time in the 1970s and has never been remotely precious about her stories, which means she’s told most of them loads of times already, most notably in Lester Bangs’s Blondie (1980) and in Making Tracks: The Rise of Blondie (1982), an autobiography ghosted by Victor Bockris but written, supposedly, by Harry herself, in collaboration with ...”

“... campaigns in history’.What strategic bombing does to a city is to produce, by military means, something similar to the massive urban destruction of last year’s earthquakes in Turkey and Syria: mangled pipes and wires, the ganglia of shorn rebars and masonry, homes cut in half, exposing their foundations like uprooted trees. Somehow there seems to ...”

“... her as he had smiled in the Exchequer House.She cried out in feigned alarm: ‘My lord . . . what means this?’He smiled. As though she did not know! But he enjoyed the masquerade as much as she did. Of late she had perhaps been overeager, and a certain amount of resistance had always appealed to him. So she protested but her heart was not in the ...”

“... his conscience clean while others did the dirty work: it required determined resistance to war by means of direct action. Pacifism – as well as poetry – led him to Herbert Read, Britain’s most famous anarchist, and he absorbed many of Read’s ideas. The state became the primary target of his political critique. Drawing on psychoanalysis, he argued that ...”