“... attributes of genius. Another is that its operation entails lateral thinking. Another is that it means being a medium rather than a maker: the inventiveness of those who have genius does not seem to come from them but through them. An artist can be touched with genius without becoming a great artist. And the artist of genius can be a hedgehog or a fox. When ...”

“... between cowboy operators and the HSE, the HSE always has to concede, because it has very few means of checking the credentials of either employers or their workers. It is also the case that the regulations do not do anything to solve the problem of the extended periods of unemployment that can push a man into illegal work. Beneath the trumpeted headlines ...”

“... of his seniors, the condemnation of his critics, and the faint sniggers of academics offstage. David Owen has had his prescription for Britain patronised by Grimond and Powell, dissected by Ken Coates, and treated like a first-year undergraduate’s essay by Professor Peter Townsend. With his publishers bringing its publication forward to catch the ...”

“... David Keenan’s​ first novel, This Is Memorial Device: An Hallucinated Oral History of the Post-Punk Scene in Airdrie, Coatbridge and Environs 1978-86 (2017), documents the rise and fall of a fictitious (though awesomely real) band called Memorial Device. Its members are from Keenan’s home town of Airdrie – about thirteen miles east of Glasgow – and the book takes the form of 26 testimonies from band members, friends, jilted lovers, relatives, hangers-on and rival acts ...”

“... greatest bond that unites those awaiting execution. Stafford-Smith claims that ‘nobody with the means to pay for an effective defence ever ends up on Death Row.’ Of those currently on Death Row none could afford private representation, and all had to have a court-appointed attorney. Stafford-Smith maintains that unless a particular case is going to ...”

“... When Elizabeth David’s A Book of Mediterranean Food appeared in 1950, many of the ingredients it called for were unobtainable. But even after meat came off the ration, few people can have had much practical need for a traditional Turkish recipe for stuffing a whole sheep. That was not the point. Saturated with description, of figs and aubergines, of fishing boats at anchor in Marseille and paella pans left out to dry in Spanish courtyards, Mediterranean Food brought a beakerful of the warm South to chilly, postwar England ...”

“... the teaching burden of thirty to forty hours a week which he had hitherto endured. But he was, David Boucher tells us, as intellectually isolated within his own university as he was from the broader philosophical currents represented by Russell. His chief influences came from quite elsewhere – notably, from the Italian idealists, Croce, Gentile and de ...”

“... later to serve as one of London’s first cinemas). Other French paintings, including a version of David’s Coronation of Napoleon, with its dazzling profusion of documentary details, were shown separately in London in the same period. By the mid-century touring exhibitions were taking some popular English pictures such as John Martin’s Great Day of his ...”

“... premises to a firm controlled by Green’s wife, from which they were then leased back. By this means, the firm’s owners got hard cash in the present by loading the firm with obligations in the future – to fund pensions, to maintain its premises and to repay its creditors. To cover these liabilities, of course, the firm had to maintain itself as a going ...”

“... even North America, protect him from the charge of parochialism. Even so, one is left wishing that means could be found to take him round on circuit, so that more of England at least could be brought under his penetrating gaze. One area he is evidently unfamiliar with is the western edge of the Weald, that very distinctive belt of abruptly precipitous ...”

“... and Dalton differed furiously, and at the end of the decade irreconcilably, but they differed over means, not over ends. Their most violent quarrels had to do with foreign and defence policy, not with the pace or direction of socialisation at home. Even their dispute over emergency powers concerned the methods by which a future Labour government would achieve ...”

“... the emotional connection is so obvious that it scarcely needs pointing out: to him, being British means, among other things, not being European. Less obviously, his attitudes to England, English literature and English history also help to explain his otherwise baffling inability to understand his opponents on the opposite side of the argument. For the ...”

“... that tragedy does indeed occur in the lives of ordinary people, that modern life is by no means devoid of exemplary suffering and death, and that the real tragedy of tragedy is that it could often have been avoided. Eagleton endorses all these arguments and directs them at a generation he regards as either besotted with a belief in self-fashioning, a ...”

“... nouvelles à la main. The absolute monarchy became increasingly tolerant of these and other means of bypassing official censorship, using it to gauge public feelings or manipulate them – at its peril, Darnton’s account implies. These​ days we know very well that more news doesn’t always result in more truthful information. The ideas and emotions ...”

“... were unquestionably enhanced as authors by their criminality. However, this is not essential: Mr David Stockman, President Reagan’s first Director of the Office of Management and Budget, the OMB, has been offered a million or so for the rendering of his tenure in public office. This latter involved no known larceny or perversion of law: Mr Stockman gained ...”