“... in those first years was very fierce, very dangerous and it had to be controlled ... We know we committed some excesses, and your case is just one of them’: he would have been more prudent to have protested some years later. The treatment of political prisoners under Castro as described here was a great deal ...”

“... was a loud, persistent harrier of the status quo, whose resistance to change he despised. ‘We are an intensely conservative society,’ he said on the BBC in 1956, and ‘a class society, with marked social inequality … the obsession with the past, our heritage, not only softens some of the blows of the present but prevents us from tackling some of ...”

“... and entertainment. This was made plain early on in the The Habit of Art, in a speech by the Dean which had to be cut, as favourite bits of my scripts often are.The Brewhouse is not a garret, quite; say sheltered accommodation rather. A granny flat. But mark this. If the college is minded to provide this accommodation it’s for nothing so vulgar as a ...”

“... his deeper and more continuous project involves a more direct (although double) question. Why do we find it so hard to understand apparently simple things, and why are our acts of understanding themselves often so hard to understand? The notion of understanding occurs in key places in the first and the last but one of the essays in Bury Place Papers, and ...”

“... is ‘our Chaucer, our Homer, our Dante, our Virgil, because Huckleberry Finn is the nearest thing we have to a national epic. Just as the Declaration of Independence ... contains in embryo our whole future history as a nation, so the language of Huckleberry Finn (another Declaration of Independence) expresses our popular character, our humour, our ...”

“... of the United Nations now fighting there would have long since attempted to pull out ... Certainly we must be extremely wary and watchful of both sides. Of course, the fact remains that the probable enemy is the communists, but Rhee has been such an unsatisfactory ally that it is difficult indeed to avoid excoriating him in the strongest of terms. It is hard ...”

“... who was the source of the leak. In May, a Harvard law professor lost his position as residential dean because he had joined Harvey Weinstein’s legal team. The protests that led to his decision to step down were a sign of how much contempt young women have for the process of the law, which they see as an abusive mechanism. It was also a reminder that the ...”

“... the bar of the Hotel Saint Georges. Over the barman Ali Bitar’s martinis and other concoctions, we compared impressions of our daylight excursions to the fluctuating frontiers between Beirut’s mutually hostile neighbourhoods. Our dispatches filed by telex, we relaxed in leather armchairs, well out of mortar range, or so ...”

“... has done by creating a false religion (‘Behold His Royal and Imperial American Highness’). As we have seen from the contents of Elvisly Yours, a parodic kingship is undeniable: but Goldman wants us to take the Presley religion seriously not just as a pattern of exploitation but as a social force. Though he will later spend many pages ridiculing Elvis’s ...”

“... of the inauguration of an academic programme in October 1895, in two rented rooms in what is now John Adam Street. Nor is it unprecedented for someone who has run the School to write about it. One can point to the austere history of the LSE’s foundation by Sir Sydney Caine, or to what Dahrendorf calls ‘William Beveridge’s intriguing London School of ...”

“... following the test his secretary said he looked as though he were thinking: ‘Oh God, what have we done!’He was a brilliant physicist, a charismatic leader and a skilful administrator; he was also a deeply reflective and troubled man, sensitive enough to question the conventional wisdom of the powerful even as he struggled to maintain his influence among ...”

“... circuit, but he was less familiar with the recording studio. He was ‘terrible’, his producer John Hammond recalled: ‘Bobby popped every p, hissed every s, and habitually wandered off mike.’ But in another sense he knew just what he was doing. The album was made in just six hours of studio time – two three-hour sessions – at a cost of around ...”

“... was loving, but I have never felt the family of God to be especially loving. The church to which we belonged was part of the Church of England, but during the Seventies it had been ‘renewed’ and now considered itself ‘charismatic’. These code words seem dated now; at the time they meant that the church felt itself to have been visited by the Holy ...”

“... the Tommy Dorsey band, had a slick new press agent called Milton Rubin, and the beginnings of what we would now call a posse. It was a personal turning point for the young man Jimmy Durante dubbed ‘Moonlight Sinatra’, at a moment when bigger changes were in the air. This was an era when audiences bugged out to live music, rather than losing themselves in ...”

“... a similar period; Les Enfants du Paradis, for instance, the first French film I ever saw and which we were taken from school to see at the Tower in Upper Briggate in Leeds. Then when I was on the Russian course during National Service at Cambridge we used to see French films at the Arts cinema – Une partie de campagne, Le ...”