“... Queens, it was a world apart. ‘“Be a killer,”’ Fred Trump, ‘who ruled all of us with a steel will’, told him. Then he said: ‘“You are a king.”’Trump wasn’t looked down on in Manhattan because he was a parvenu, a dressed-to-kill bridge-and-tunnel bounder from an outer borough. New Yorkers hardly have a bias against aspiring ...”

“... social and cultural – interdependencies between the states that made up the initial Coal and Steel Community and its sequels. The tenor of this first wave of interpretation was neo-functionalist, stressing the additive logic of institutional development: that is, the way modest functional changes tended to lead to complementary alterations along an ...”

“... contain something about his love life as well as his thoroughly tedious hate life with David Steel and the Liberal party. If that was the calculation, it certainly worked. The doctor’s early love affairs and his wooing of Debbie dominated the press reaction to his book. The loving details about his relationships with the other three members of the Gang ...”

“... simple identification of the praiser of Shakespeare, upon whose words the whole dedication turns: John Webster, in the note ‘To the Reader’ before The White Devil. Browning’s Elizabethanised play has its affinities with Webster: moreover, it was canny of him to emend Webster’s prefatory words so as to reduce them to a single-minded praise of ...”

“... a professional position in London similar to his own in Berlin. One possible equivalent was John Nash, the royal architect: had they met, their interview would have made a great, if unconsciously comic centrepiece to the journal. Nash and his work epitomised the Regency and its stucco-fronted standards, high taste and low morals. In his ebullient ...”

“... to office in the following decade, than some of their old opponents from the right. But, as John Campbell makes clear in this marvellously lucid and moving reassessment of the political career of Aneurin Bevan, the similarities with the Thirties were only skin-deep. This time, the schisms did touch the core of party purpose. Though Left and Right both ...”

“... when an unhealed wound remains? Not long before the vote, the point was cruelly rubbed in. John Howard’s Liberal-Coalition government made the unusual decision to invade its own country, by sending the Australian Defence Force into the Northern Territory. His aim was to deal decisively with concerns about child abuse and corruption among the mainly ...”

“... tentacular furious careful – alsotapping – also pressing gently to feel foredge – loved steel stone wood iron wax melt ofacetylene till yr gloveburned thru bc ucld not waitThe loss of one’s parents puts a person on the front line, and in Graham’s case her own end became a stark reality in 2021, with a second cancer diagnosis about which she has ...”

“... little of the venom or relish of such fellow plutocrats as Henry Clay Frick, Andrew Carnegie or John D. Rockefeller. Most criticism he ignored, cultivating a forbidding taciturnity. ‘He left no record of his response’ is a familiar motif in the biography. What Morgan left instead – and what the biography exhaustively records and explains – are ...”

“... by the outstanding writers associated with it, such as Robert Penn Warren (All the King’s Men), John Crowe Ransom, Allen Tate, even Robert Lowell, who literally pitched his tent on Tate’s lawn. All of these must have responded warmly to Robert Frost’s patriotic poem ‘The Gift Outright’: ours before we were the land’s. She was our land more than a ...”

“... finding ‘efficiencies’ and generating savings. McKinsey helped nationalise British Steel, and then helped privatise it. In 1967, the British Transport Docks Board commissioned it to produce a report on containerisation. Dockers in London and Liverpool had been striking throughout the year in an attempt to decasualise the process of hiring ...”

“... of industrial revolution. This generated enough domestic capital to power the next phase: iron and steel, shipbuilding and heavy engineering. Production took place in Scotland, but the product itself was overwhelmingly exported. By about 1870, there was a surplus of capital for domestic use, and Scottish savings began to pour overseas, often through the new ...”

“... of the 18th and 19th centuries, most of the land enclosed was added to existing farms, but in 1809 John Hulton used the land allotted to him from the enclosure of Marske Moor in Swaledale to create a new farm, Cordilleras. The farm and most of the fields round about were named after places in South America, Valparaiso, Cotopaxi, Sierra Pedragosa and so ...”

“... Private Gardens of London. Written by a landscape gardener, and beautifully photographed by John Miller, the book’s focus is a series of nearly forty gardens from different parts of the metropolis. The Museum of London’s scheme to collect pictures and photographs of London gardens will surely result in a more representative sample, but this is a ...”

“... and rent a video while you did your laundry in machines named after movie stars; mine was called John Belushi. At 8.30 a.m., groups of kids in tie-died grunge were guzzling beer and nachos, and watching Rodney Dangerfield deliver double entendres about policemen’s balls on the big video screen. But Natalie and I had a running battle over my reluctance to ...”