“... and I came across the local racecourse. She would put the dog on its lead and I would approach the white rails where the horses – with their mad eyes, soft telescopic nostrils, bulging veins and bony legs – were being restrained in front of the nooses stretched across the track by tense, hunched dwarfs in brilliant silks who abused each other with words I ...”

“... conspicuously unionist stance: the referendum day edition of the Times came with a wraparound red, white and blue cover featuring a quote from ‘Auld Lang Syne’ on the reverse and a brief history of the Union on the inside pages. Almost 45 per cent of Scots voted to leave the UK, but only one newspaper, the Sunday Herald, backed a ‘Yes’ vote. The ...”

“... can revalidate cast-offs with wit; photographers prove you can make them look good in black and white. The beauty of bath can be oppressive, and if the choice were put in terms of living rather than visiting, many might prefer the visual anarchy of a development zone. The anxiety the Prince’s polite cityscapes would save us from could be replaced by ...”

“... only takes over the reader, but the subject of an essay as well. There is a piece collected in The White Bird about a nude by Frans Hals. No nude by Hals exists, and the essay constructs one. Berger describes details (‘the slewed sheet, its folds like grey twigs woven together to make a nest, and its highlights like falling water’). The same kind of ...”

“... her little hands, I would think of them laid, immovable leaden velvet, on the neck of some poor white hunter, before she inclined her little neck to begin the imperative neat destruction of her victim.’ A Case of Knives is a first novel which, for all its evident talent and intelligence, feels curiously empty, a treatment without a subject. Burning your ...”

“... all that was left of the old neighbourhood was a chemical factory. One of his mates at school was Peter Hook, who ended up playing bass in the band; Hook likes to describe himself as an ‘oik’. Curtis was more bookish, and isolated. Joy Division’s music was bleak, full of frustration, fear and guilt. They were produced by Martin Hannett, whose studio ...”

“... wear the ‘absurdly uncomfortable’ clothes into which the Victorian child was squeezed, the ‘white piqué starched frocks’ and the velvet hair ribbons ‘fastened with a bit of elastic looped over a button behind the ear’ that was so tight it gave her a headache. Difficulties with clothes occur in many of her books. ...”

“... the 1929 Election. In response, the Conservative Government took the unusual step of issuing a White Paper, outlining the Treasury’s objections. When Keynes in turn reviewed this publication, he took particular exception to the way it concluded with the bland contention that the root cause of unemployment lay in the high money costs of ...”

“... evidence supporting Khodorkovsky had actually given evidence against him. Black was turned to white, white to black. The very absurdity was the point: the Kremlin was saying it had complete control over reality and that whatever it said, however ridiculous, was the truth. Since the Khodorkovsky trial there have been a ...”

“... the first morning had a giddy, almost nervous energy. It was overwhelmingly, if not exclusively, white. The biggest constituency, men in jeans and T-shirts, wouldn’t have looked out of place at one of the rock concerts advertised on the NEC’s hoardings.Inside the main hall, the queue for the bar was already twenty people deep at 10.30 a.m. Senior ...”

“... My first thoughts, in connection with suits, are of Lucky Lucan, Joseph Beuys and the Thin White Duke, at the head of an imaginary horde of accountants, dandies, clubland heroes, zoot-suiters and funeral directors. It has taken me some time to realise that the question of suits is indeed a crucial question, not only about fashion but about sexual identity, national culture and art history ...”

“... of the Tin Tent During the first push on the Somme a temporary captain in the Royal Engineers – Peter Nissen a Canadian designed an experimental steel tent that could be erected from stacked materials by an NCO and eight men in 110 minutes so the Nissen hut is the descendant and enriched relation of the Elephant and other similar steel structures that were ...”

“... as the First Reform Bill or the Charge of the Light Brigade. I have started by reading in parallel Peter Jenkins’s Mrs Thatcher’s Revolution and the two concluding volumes of Halévy’s magisterial History of the English People in the 19th Century, which between them take the story from 1895 to 1914. The contrast is not so much between an era of greatness ...”

“... struck him as ‘bizarre’, in that the interview took place on the day her husband, Peter Robinson, went to Downing Street to accept the role of First Minister of the Northern Ireland Assembly ‘and there really was a sense that Iris had stolen his thunder’. Black, who was hired as her political adviser, does not say when he decided to ...”

“... of the electorate in 1964 to 34 per cent in 1983. The big growth was in the routine non-manual or white-collar labour force (from 18 to 24 per cent), and in the salariat of managers and executives, professionals and semi-professionals (from 18 to 27 per cent). Since 1964, they conclude, ‘Britain has been transformed from a blue-collar society into a ...”