“... universal services such as university tuition, prescriptions, period products and bus travel for young and old. But there has been little direct confrontation with the middle classes who also benefit from these things.Since the Greens joined the SNP in government in 2021, however, things do seem to have shifted further left. Humza Yousaf, who replaced Nicola ...”

“... Grace Academy in Brixton. The programme was launched in 2000 by the then education secretary, David Blunkett, who explained that if sponsors put up £2 million, or 20 per cent of the capital costs, such ‘businesses, individuals, churches or voluntary bodies’ would get ‘considerable freedom over management structures and processes’, and of course a ...”

“... the story, and from other evidence, that it was the disturbance to the natural order that made the young Isaiah tremble and flinch. Other members of his family, including a much-loved uncle and aunt, were quite active supporters of the SR (Socialist Revolutionary) movement. Neither then nor in retrospect did he register any allegiance of that sort. Ignatieff ...”

“... blue-framed glasses, floppy dyed-blonde locks and middle-aged paunch, I was beginning to resemble David Hockney. But she has become a lot less dangerous overall. I take advantage of her inattention and quiz Blakey under my breath: Do you think I look like a MAN? B. gives me an appraising glance but is non-committal. Then everything lands on our table in a ...”

“... given a white piano for her birthday: she sits on it and is wheeled round the room by a crowd of young men in dinner jackets who are supposedly students at an all-male college. Walters himself dances with Garland as she spins round the room with a Ginger Rogers-ish velocity and style. Her dress is floor-length and fitted down to the hips, with embroidery ...”

“... in my view, but that’s a topic for another day.)The head scientist at Nvidia was a man called David Kirk. As he told Witt,‘with parallel computing, it really took us a fair amount of convincing to talk Jensen into it … Same with CUDA. We really had to make the business case.’ But with AI, Huang experienced a Damascene epiphany. ‘He got it ...”

“... intellectual and emotional energy, when he left Ireland and pursued a career in England. As David Bromwich has already pointed out, there is an English Burke whom O’Brien never makes known to his readers. He understands, and can excitingly depict, the oratory and politics of Burke’s House of Commons; but since he is intent on arguing that the ghosts ...”

“... and the titillating, although Knowlson’s sureness of touch deserts him on the topic of the young Beckett and prostitutes, his prose veering wildly between the disingenuously coy and the frankly sexist. Above all, there is the novelty value of the unpublished diaries Beckett kept during his stay in Germany in 1936-7. We get a sense of Beckett ...”

“... Brideshead has been built up is really adequate to the issues at stake. Conservative writers like David Watkin, Roger Scruton and, to a lesser extent recently, Gavin Stamp have worked with impressive zeal to see that every wretched tower block in the land is listed as a national monument to the reforming ambitions of 1945. They have also presented themselves ...”

“... College Hospital was dead and all medical records destroyed: but I very foolishly forgot that the young houseman does the day-to-day work, and he wrote to me from his retirement with important new evidence. Apparently Orwell didn’t stand a chance: but they did not tell him, or Sonia. The nature of George Orwell’s own writings raises three particular ...”

“... year of two Russian colleagues at different ends of the journalistic ladder – Dmitry Kholodov, a young reporter on Moskovsky Komsomolets, killed by a briefcase bomb while investigating corruption in the military; and Vladislav Listyev, killed after he announced that notoriously corrupt advertising practices would be suspended at the main state TV channel ...”

“... tactic was successful with several Democratic luminaries on the committee staff – among them the young Hillary Rodham – and as a result Nixon was able to leave power with the moral equivalent of a plea-bargain. One consequence of that period of moral and political leniency, misrepresented by self-pitying Nixonites as a lynching, was that Nixon’s estate ...”

“... the operation that remained, there was almost no first-hand reporting. One freelance journalist, David Divine, made three trips in a small boat that was rescuing British troops, and the Royal Navy took a Pathé newsreel reporter-cum-cameraman; otherwise the BBC (and British newspapers) relied on the Ministry of Information. The consequences were a mixture of ...”

“... birthday letter to Lay: ‘55 years old. Wow! That is really old. Thank goodness you have such a young, beautiful wife.’ Political links outside the US were also important, particularly in India, where Enron’s massively expensive Dabhol electricity generating plant, the first such privately owned project in the Subcontinent, was mired in controversy, and ...”

“... his ears, and eyes wide open behind his pince-nez. He is evidently still drunk. Like so many young ruined Parisians before him he’d fallen in with a dodgy Spanish poet – J.P. Contamine de Latour, real name José Maria Vicente Ferrer Francisco de Paola Patricio Manuel Contamine, from Tarragona. Years later, Latour managed to piece together the ...”