“... Blair was our MP. I don’t remember there being any kudos attached to this, apart from the time George W. Bush visited in the autumn of 2003 and Blair took him for a pint at a nearby pub. In 2007, a few months after Blair resigned as prime minister, I went to Cambridge to start my degree, the first in my family to go straight from school to university. I ...”

“... of the rhubarb for which the place was once well known, and we chug onwards to Wakefield, where George Gissing is not commemorated as fully as he might be – too ‘grim’, perhaps, and too heavily challenged, like many formerly industrial towns and all socialist novelists, for a happy ending. McKie’s purpose is not so much to deny that present-day ...”

“... with contempt and unacknowledged love.’ Maxley’s trauma serves as a licence for reveries on urban loneliness and his feeling that modern life is inauthentic and ‘filthy’. Though he’s presented as a victim of arrested development, a lack of ironic distance means he often comes across as a spokesman for male self-pity who hasn’t finished digesting ...”

“... the Nineties will be a decade of major change. This has set me wondering what kind of reaction George Carey might expect if the plans he had in mind for his own organisation were at all like those being implemented under William Waldegrave. Capitation fees and evangelism budgets for individual priests? The chance for churches to opt out of diocesan ...”

“... ways by later theorists when the public dimension of civic humanism seemed to be privatised by an urban commercial culture. In Barrell’s account the discourse of civic humanism suppressed or at best subordinated all others, whether religious (Anglican, Dissenter, Deist) or literary (satiric, pastoral, georgic) or simply anti-civic humanist. Barrell’s own ...”

“... refrains in Hardy’s criticism for the last ten years. Her starting-point here would seem to be George Eliot’s contention that the novel’s highest end is the extension of human sympathy. This noble purpose is the goal to which all the novel’s art (its ‘form’) is directed. Hardy deliberately employs the vague word ‘feeling’ in preference to ...”

“... to their stock of ideas: Goethe, Heine, Herder, Novalis, Jean Paul, Madame de Staël, Stendhal, George Sand. Many English writers, resisting the fanaticism with which phrenology was being promoted (George Combe’s The Constitution of Man, the central manifesto of the cult, sold 50,000 copies between 1835 and 1838 ...”

“... with Haig and Robertson that the war could only be won on the Western Front and those, like Lloyd George and Churchill, who believed in ‘knocking away the props’ – but between those who believed in a traditional British strategy of minimal military and maximal economic contribution, of harbouring economic strength in support of Continental allies who ...”

“... Assistance Grant. Byrne was a New York City police officer murdered in 1988 by drug dealers; George H.W. Bush used the case in his election campaign, during which he accused Michael Dukakis of being soft on crime. In November of the same year, Congress passed the Anti-Drug Abuse Act, the opening salvo in the ‘War on Drugs’, which has done little to ...”

“... wrote to Ezra Pound, who had recently settled in Rapallo, enclosing some poems and an article on George Bernard Shaw. Tessimond’s letter does not survive, but Pound’s reply does. ‘Dear Sir,’ he wrote, If you were in the least familiar with my work you wd. know what I think of criticism in general & not try to arouse my interest with a perfectly ...”

“... very public, very secretive man? Slater has read it all, from pathos-ridden tales of an abandoned urban waif, to psychoanalytic accounts of a long-dead man, to attacks on a high-handed writer’s ways of dealing with other people – especially members of his family. His own 1983 study, Dickens and Women, offers a sympathetic and judicious treatment of the ...”

“... across the globe somehow refuse to go on? Whether the design object is Young British Art or George W. Bush, ‘brand equity’ – the branding of a product name on an attention-deficit public – is fundamental, and hence design is too. Consumer attention and image-retention are all the more important when the product is not an object at all. This ...”

“... teaching of Islam and the words of the message of the Koran can possibly justify the slaughter.’ George W. Bush joined in: ‘Islam’s teachings are good and peaceful, and those who commit evil in the name of Allah blaspheme the name of Allah. The terrorists are traitors to their own faith.’ Blair’s handling and discussion of the Koran was highly ...”

“... armies. Vigilantes roamed the South terrorising and lynching uppity African Americans. Massive urban fortresses, public armouries that were often financed by robber barons and equipped with Gatling guns and modern munitions, were designed to deal ruthlessly with incipient insurrections. Responding in kind, armed worker militias paraded in the streets of ...”

“... are the interconnecting stories of fictitious people in American films, and whose narrator is George Bailey – the James Stewart character from It’s a wonderful life. The family romance is the construction George Bailey discovers in, or reads into, the plots of the films noirs ...”