“... the saints, to the cautionary lives of the rich and addicted. The anthropology of Malinowski and Margaret Mead was another crucial inspiration, for their vision of alternative social arrangements (and sexual freedom) provided passionate support for culture over nature, for social conditioning over biological destiny. Beauvoir’s The Second Sex, which had ...”

“... 1974. In February the SNP won seven seats with 22 per cent of the national vote. In October, that rose to eleven seats with 30 per cent. While the party surged into second place in Labour seats across the country, most of its new MPs represented the old unionist heartlands that Petrie emphasises: places like Banffshire, Argyll, and Moray and Nairn, where ...”

“... the conventional case for the middle way at the Conservative Research Department in the Seventies, Margaret Thatcher pulled out a copy of Hayek’s The Constitution of Liberty. ‘This,’ she proclaimed, ‘is what we believe.’ (The now elderly economist was in turn much affected by his disciple. Asked for his impressions on meeting her, he was, as ...”

“... to the studio bosses. When Garland became pregnant by her first husband, a musician called David Rose, the studio encouraged her to have an abortion: a baby would have ruined her image as a girlish ingénue.Garland felt the oppression of being an eternal teenager so keenly that she didn’t immediately welcome Meet Me in St Louis when discussions about it ...”

“... years is reaching the point of crisis. The party in power, whose late 20th-century figurehead, Margaret Thatcher, did so much to create the problem, is responding by separating off the economically least powerful and squeezing them into the smallest, meanest, most insecure possible living space. In effect, if not in explicit intention, it is a ...”

“... in farming communities reported experiencing orgasm as a result of animal contact, a number that rose to 65 per cent in some rural settings. In his study of American women in 1953, Kinsey found that just under 4 per cent had engaged in sexual activity with an animal since adolescence; almost all these cases involved dogs or cats. In 1974, the sexologist ...”

“... As both the expectations which voters now had of the Welfare State and the costs of meeting them rose in parallel, so did their unwillingness to have it funded out of their own pockets. Soaking the rich was not a sufficient answer; punitive levels of tax at the upper end of the distribution of incomes, even if they could be effectively applied, were not ...”

“... and Circumstances’. The assignment had an added appeal: Agee would not be obliged to work with Margaret Bourke-White, Fortune’s staff photographer, whose work he scorned. He wanted Evans, a photographer he knew and admired. The FSA agreed to lend Evans for the project, but retained its rights to whatever pictures he produced.Travelling the backroads of ...”

“... from Harry (Henry) and mentions of Wim (William), and a Mad Hatter’s tea party attended by Margaret Fuller, Emily Dickinson, Myrtha from Giselle and Kundry from Parsifal. The back and forth of the opening dialogue between Alice and Nurse – ‘can’, ‘can’t’, ‘won’t’, ‘can’t’ – plays out a Jamesian dilemma about the invalid’s ...”

“... His body was found a week later by an Italian hovercraft crew. Overnight, the waters around Mythe rose with a speed that staggered the flood specialists. Perry showed me a chart plotting the level of the River Severn at the bridge next to the waterworks, sourced from an agency gauge. A red line charts the story of the floods of winter 2000; from a high base ...”

“... the likes of Wilshaw have finally beaten back the tide of ‘progressive’ education methods that rose in the 1960s and 1970s, propelled by the 1967 Plowden Report on primary education, which held that ‘“finding out” has proved to be better for children than “being told”,’ and that the most successful schools had dissolved the distinction between ...”

“... a few years of comparative cool, the temperature of the debate between Klein and her opponents rose sharply when, in about 1933, her own daughter Melitta was elected to full membership of the British Psycho-Analytical Association. Relations between the two had been strained for some years, but now an open war erupted. Melitta (backed by Edward Glover, her ...”

“... his period in Northern Ireland (he remained the Ulster Unionist MP for South Down until 1987), Margaret Thatcher took care to stay on friendly terms with Powell, partly out of a certain sympathy with his views and partly because his support, even when it was tacit, could do her no harm, but she never made any move to tempt him back into the Tory fold, for ...”

“... to Life’ about the taxonomy of his beloved roses: ‘After learning all their names – Rose/de Rescht, Cornelia, Pax – it is important to forget them.’ To remember this caveat the reader would, ideally, have sought out the poem itself, where the names are not forgotten but cherished. And in the act of saying them over, Schuyler pays homage to ...”

“... his intimacy with tired ground that is about to be invaded, overwhelmed, rewritten. The advent of Margaret Thatcher was announced, as MacKenzie’s crime fable makes clear, by a slippery handshake of mutually beneficial relationships between local government corruption (‘The new casino’s gone through’), kickbacks to rogue Irish Republicans in the ...”