“... the views of the medical profession. It didn’t work. Tony Blair’s first health minister, Frank Dobson, read its funeral rites when Labour came to power seven years later. Yet at the turn of the millennium, Alan Milburn replaced Dobson and Labour introduced a new, more radical version of that market. It was Labour that introduced foundation ...”

“... by Kim Stanley Robinson in his novel Forty Signs of Rain – begins with the Scientists for Johnson Campaign, run by a group of eminent scientists who were worried about Barry Goldwater’s apparent eagerness to wage nuclear war. Their campaign had a considerable impact, and when Richard Nixon got to the White House four years later he was convinced ...”

“... War – indeed, it was the worldview that consigned Barry Goldwater to crushing defeat by Lyndon Johnson in 1964. But eventually it moved inside the charmed circle, becoming regarded as responsible opinion and engulfing the Democratic Party even more thoroughly than the Republicans.During the weeks, months and years after the towers fell, as fear and anger ...”

“... a premonition of pain, a muscular response to something that hasn’t yet happened. Therefore, as Frank Kermode wrote in the LRB (13 May 2010), the shudder is ‘a highly emotional affair, deeply involved with acts of imagination’. It’s easy, he says, ‘to imagine an act of reading as accompanied by shuddering’. On their first meeting, Dickinson told ...”