“... forum, temple etc) as a prototype for subsequent empire-building – including, in the idiom of Michael Hardt and Antonio Negri, our own Empire of supranational sovereignty and global capitalism. Harvard Design School Guide to Shopping is a compendium of 45 essays by 15 participants with the usual killer images and stats (for example, yearly sales at ...”

“... of the place collides with their heightened religious expectations. One such deranged soul, Michael Rohan, an Australian Protestant trying to hasten the end of the world, set fire to the venerable Al-Aqsa Mosque in 1969, and smiled serenely throughout his subsequent trial; the horrified Israeli government was only too aware that his actions had done ...”

“... years’.The government was determined to extract an apology from the men. The attorney general, Michael Havers, was sent to Walton to persuade them. Havers went from cell to cell, trying to talk to each man separately, promising early release. He then addressed them in the prison chapel. All they had to do was say sorry. If they did, they could leave that ...”

“... up relying on things like the Welfare Disposal Scheme, where pigs are removed for next to nothing. Gordon Brown’s bright idea: they give you £50 for a pig that costs £80 to produce.’‘What can be done?’ The stormy weather was making his phone crackly.‘Well, this Government has no interest in farming,’ he said. ‘People in the countryside in ...”

“... inside J.C. Penney’s or Costco or Safeway, they’ve looked hardly less exotic than poor Michael Dukakis did on board his ill-advised tank. But the moment that Sarah Palin stepped up to the mike at the Republican Convention in St Paul, and began talking in her homely, mezzo-soprano, Far Western twang, she showed herself to be incontestably the real ...”

“... that, in return, doctors would support the NHS. Bevan agreed, and an amending Act was drawn up. Michael Foot, in his recently republished biography of Bevan, concludes that ‘the Minister and the president of the Royal College of Physicians established an accord.’ It was an accord that split the profession (the BMA accused the College of ...”

“... UN ambition for some states to spend 0.7 per cent of GDP on aid. Others are still up for debate. Gordon Brown recently revived the idea of abolishing the House of Lords. One of Benn’s biggest goals was realised in 2020, when the UK left the EU.The 1983 manifesto was so long and so Bennite because of the party’s right. John Golding, self-described ...”

“... with the disease that leads to Brexity symptoms of racial exclusivity. The shudders that greeted Gordon Brown’s call for ‘British jobs for British workers’, or Jeremy Corbyn’s complaint of ‘wholesale importation of underpaid workers from central Europe’, are proof enough. To the extent that there is a Remainer folk-myth, it only underlines these ...”

“... the conical elevation of Stave Hill. The seductive ‘Plan of the London Mounds’ in Elizabeth Gordon’s Prehistoric London (1914) showed a triangulation between the Llandin (Parliament Hill), the Penton Mound (the site of the New River reservoir), Bryn Gwyn (at the Tower of London) and Tothill (Westminster). Here, at the cult centre of the emerging ...”

“... of the financial sector had left Britain overexposed – in his Keynesian response to the crisis, Gordon Brown had pulled the economy back from the brink of disaster, even into modest growth by the time of the 2010 election. Labour had still gone into that campaign arguing that spending reductions would be necessary (largely at the insistence of Brown’s ...”

“... vote. Alex Salmond’s predecessor as leader of the Scottish National Party, the social democrat Gordon Wilson, happened to be our local MP in East Dundee. The gap between him and radical socialists like George Galloway, then cutting his teeth in the bear pit of the Dundee Labour Party, was great, but seemed neither so great nor so significant as the gap ...”

“... Richard Gambino’s Blood of My Blood: The Problem of Italian Americans, for example, and Michael Arlen’s Passage to Ararat. Capitalism turned all this into profit, initially through print publication and the rise of professional genealogy services, and on to the consumer DNA tests and paywalled online databases of today. Genealogy became ...”

“... well as its product offering.’ I heard that the military was developing robot soldiers. I heard Gordon Johnson of the Joint Forces Command at the Pentagon say: ‘They don’t get hungry. They’re not afraid. They don’t forget their orders. They don’t care if the guy next to them has just been shot.’ I heard him say: ‘I have been asked what happens ...”

“... it (‘When Thatcherism becomes a “wasm”, everyone will wonder what all the fuss was about,’ Gordon Brown was still quipping in the LRB in 1989). The Leninists to the left of Labour, meanwhile, were looking at history as a ‘series of repeats’ – crisis, general strike, Winter Palace, here we come – although history suggests that the ‘sharpening ...”

“... instalments, but it didn’t matter: I read and reread the piece that summer. Sharply written by Michael Watts, it covered the aftermath of the Pistols’ split at the end of a disastrous American tour; the fitful struggle to make a Sex Pistols movie; McLaren’s dalliance with managing the Slits; the fatal stabbing of Nancy Spungen, holed up with Sid ...”