“... by gassing, starvation and lethal injection to their doctors’ ‘aristocratic’ values. David Blackbourn took the lead in dismantling this paradigm. With Geoff Eley, he wrote The Peculiarities of German History: Bourgeois Society and Politics in 19th-Century Germany (1984), which attacked the new orthodoxy on a number of fronts. Blackbourn’s main ...”

“... here he was, tanned, yoga-fit, like the unofficial leader of a libertarian party: legalise dope! Rock ’n’ roll and free phone-calls. A late-night TV pundit, a wrinkly hero at Megatripolis, wowing the non-voters, the under-age certainties. While the wobbling jogger, Bill Clinton with his Airforce One, on-board haircuts costing thousands of dollars, his ...”

“... one thing: the manufacture of The Who. It is in his promotional and creative work on behalf of a rock band that father-and-son symmetries are unexpectedly conspicuous: ‘The qualities that Constant found in the ballet were those that Kit adapted and magnified in the band. Their performance required different forms of expression to be mingled; they combined ...”

“... music should express the general anxiety. I: the more the sea rages, the more precious a hard rock among the waves becomes. He: but no one will understand the meaning of this rock; besides, what is this feeling of calm based on – on health, self-assurance, individual personality? I: on the emphasis on God. He ...”

“... New Hampshire in 1823. He had a tamping iron driven through his head while his men were blasting rock to lay new track for the railroad. He lived; he should not have lived; it made him famous. We do not even know his birthday, but we know the accident occurred around 4.30 p.m., and our documentation of his case from then onwards is so extensive that it seems ...”

“... so far rightwards that it isn’t really the same party any more. In that process of migration, David Blunkett was one of the key players. Blunkett is important not only because of how he behaved when in office – we’ll get to that in a moment – but also because of the journey he took to get there. A man who from 1980 to 1987 was the leader of the ...”

“... regular invitations from the community of particle physicists who admire my films as much as rock musicians, skateboarders and various other enthusiastic denominations do.’ Herzog likes to insist that a director should be more of an athlete than an aesthete and, perhaps as a result, the memoir devotes a great deal of attention to the human body in ...”

“... immediately after the war, conditions in Britain, especially in the cities, were pretty grim. As David Kynaston tells it, people were exhausted, low in spirits, their resources depleted, and over everything there hung the threat of another, probably terminal war. The dawn of the postwar era was cold and dark and bleak, but there was a touch of pink in the ...”

“... rate rise was a consequence of the decision to exchange the relatively worthless Ostmark for the rock solid Deutschmark at the deeply patriotic rate of 1:1, thereby absorbing the former and temporarily weakening the latter. So Thatcher was right – German reunification did spell big trouble for the UK – but for the wrong reasons. She didn’t foresee the ...”

“... and what a riot we shall have. Not a day shall pass without a fresh horror. Prometheus leaves his rock to cohabit with the Furies. Jack Yeats’s judgments are better-worded than most attacks on the innovative experiments of early Modernist poetry, but they make the same charges that would be repeated, with diminishing persuasiveness, for the next twenty ...”

“... In 1987, David Cannadine concluded an essay on what he saw as the dark and doubtful state of British history with a call to ‘fashion a new version of the national past which can regain its place in our general national culture, and become once again an object of international interest’. A job application posted through the unusual medium of a scholarly journal? I doubt it, but it may be that this essay found its way onto a desk at Penguin Books, leading to Cannadine’s appointment, in 1988, as general editor of the new Penguin History of Britain ...”

“... day I remember how precarious the talks had been. Reading an article in the Daily Telegraph where David Trimble concludes his argument for a Yes vote by saying ‘we must have confidence in ourselves to face the future, not use the troubles of the past as a comfort blanket,’ I wonder how many Unionists will follow his advice. The vote will be Yes, but he ...”

“... their dependence on a day-return metropolis. Aylesbury, with its vegetable gardens (its pensioned rock stars), requires a market for its produce. Binding’s fictional family, the Bembos, are implicated in this trade. They travel to Covent Garden. They are parley-speakers from good mountebank stock, not Romanies. The ‘real’ Aylesbury is known for its ...”

“... and find it wanting – Cardew was excited by the alternative that they appeared to offer. David Tudor, Cage’s pianist and pupil, was an important new influence, as were other American composers like Morton Feldman, Earle Brown and La Monte Young. He even contemplated emigrating to the United States. Cardew returned to London to digest these ...”

“... mother of Solomon, and finally as J, mistress of the sublime and the uncanny as well as of King David. In this new book Bloom cheerfully accepts the reviewer’s proposal. That the author of what eventually became the Torah should have been the relict of the unlucky Uriah, and not an Israelite, but a Hittite, was plainly irresistible. Henceforth, he ...”