“... dark grey suits (no pinstripes), blue plastic helmets, heavy-duty wellies and – apart from John Prescott – full zip millennial grins. Showcased by a long-focus lens that tactfully blurs the background of industrial dereliction. Britain is Working. Handson management. Optimism. Good humour. That stuff. A cross between a hobbled moon walk and Neil ...”

“... in part to buy time while composing the next line. (As it happens, Parry corresponded with John and Alan Lomax, who travelled around the American South recording folk musicians.) ‘The singer of tales,’ Parry later wrote, ‘has no pen and ink to let him slowly work out a novel way of recounting novel actions, but must make up his tale without ...”

“... him with Basil Fawlty. Except that the dying Dennis Potter went further, maybe, when he called John Birt, the BBC’s then director-general, ‘a croak-voiced Dalek’ in 1993. Much expectation surrounded Doctor Who’s return last year, into an industry that has changed vastly since he went away. Mark Thompson, the BBC’s current director-general, sees ...”

“... of itself,’ he says in his Study of Thomas Hardy, a sentiment which might have been uttered by John Stuart Mill himself. But what Lawrence meant by ‘self’ was not to be confused with the ‘cheap egotism’ of the ‘self-conscious little ego’ described by modern individualism. ‘I know that life, and life only, is the clue to the ...”

“... ambassador away from the Security Council meeting in June 1950 which authorised a UN response to North Korea’s invasion of the South, because he wanted to draw US troops into Korea; that Mao helped cause Stalin’s fatal stroke; that Mao’s remarks to the East German leader Walter Ulbricht about the Great Wall had something to do with Ulbricht’s ...”

“... In the United States the provisions for ‘special education’ are very generous, partly because John Kennedy had a severely retarded sister. With special education in place, parents of autistic children fought long and hard for public awareness, and they got it. Today a child with learning and social problems will get more attention if he is labelled ...”

“... cartoon, but before he could finish what sounded uncannily like the solicitor’s speech in John Osborne’s play Inadmissible Evidence, a year or so later, Doris grabbed my sleeve and we escaped down the winding wooden staircase, with the sound of his voice echoing behind us. In addition, my mother had one of her screaming fits and threatened to sue ...”

“... former undercover officer Peter Francis, who spied on minor anti-fascist and anti-racist groups in North London in the early 1990s before infiltrating his target group, Anti-Fascist Action. While undercover, he lived alone in Highbury, drove a van and got a day job working in a school for children with special needs. (His new friends thought he was the school ...”

“... rejection of the thrust of the act would have turned the judges in the UK into activists on the North American model and it was soon seen off by Lord Steyn’s colleagues; the then senior law lord, Lord Bingham, indirectly castigated it in the course of one judgment as ‘judicial vandalism’. After a few false starts the courts eventually hit on a fairly ...”

“... are their descriptions of the invasion. Most of them were either embedded with the troops rolling north – Oliver Poole, David Zucchino, or Evan Wright of Rolling Stone, who wrote Generation Kill: Devil Dogs, Iceman, Captain America, and the New Face of American War2 – or in Baghdad waiting for the troops: McAllester, Anderson and Anne Garrels, the NPR ...”

“... upon whose backs the dead ride, high! undirtied by the putridity we fasten upon them – South to north, for this moment distinct and undeformed, into the no-knowledge of their nameless destiny. Clouds excite him partly because they perpetually assume new shapes. At the same time they suit his bleaker moods, when he feels that human consciousness spoils what ...”

“... extra critical materials which, squarely aimed at orthodox New Historicist graduate students in North America, are already looking distinctly passé). The only reputable hardback edition cheaper than the RSC is the Collins, at £20, which has small pages and small print and, though provided with new introductions in 1994 and supplementary essays by Peter ...”

“... to have reached agreement on some basic questions of what the Thesaurus was supposed to achieve. John Boardman’s introduction claims it is a ‘comprehensive guide’ but he admits that while some of the collections of evidence are nearly complete, ‘in many cases they are highly selective’. There seems to have been not nearly enough cracking of the ...”

“... founded by a mathematician, James Simons, and based in East Setauket on Long Island’s affluent north shore, is reported to charge investors in its Medallion Fund a 5 per cent management fee and a 44 per cent performance fee, though I haven’t been able to confirm those figures. To stop the performance fee from being an incentive to take wild punts, hedge ...”

“... she’d spent the last nine months telling us it wasn’t going to happen – immediately wiped North Korea from the headlines, and returned the spotlight to another, more drawn-out existential crisis: the one currently being endured by the Labour Party.What makes Jeremy Corbyn a complex political figure, rather in spite of himself, is that he is both too ...”