“... observed. ‘Well, he’s left school, hasn’t he?’ demanded my father. ‘ “School-leaver” means some no-hope fifteen-year-old from a secondary modern,’ said my mother. ‘It’s a euphemism.’ She was a well-educated woman, my mother. ‘Pays like a euphemism, too,’ she added. Years of marriage to my father had imparted a Yiddish edge to her ...”

“... question implicit in such predictions: how in practice would the House of Windsor be ended? One means would be Parliamentary legislation abolishing the monarchy: this is not a realistic possibility. Another is that the crowds rise up, storm Buckingham Palace, and bear its occupants off to the guillotine: even in the unhappy and feverish week between ...”

“... Kant and Rawls imply that whatever the answer, it will in the end be a question of geography. Size means extent, and the surface of the earth has natural and social contours which limit the extent of any putative state, no matter how well organised or well intentioned. Something more than a walled city, something less than the globe, a viable state in the ...”

“... especially if it takes a literary turn – avoid consumption altogether. Although Brown is by no means the first to argue that literature can ‘redeem’ the material world from commodification, he does so engagingly, with ingenuity, tact and an admirable breadth of reference. His first move is to turn the tables on Marx’s table-turning. The table which ...”

“... cannot avoid reading into the past the preoccupations of the present.’ And in his case, this means he has spent his prolific professional life as the Whig historian of the Welfare State – not in the crude, teleological sense of seeing everything in the last two hundred years as leading inevitably and inexorably in that direction, but more subtly, in ...”

“... for that. Trump’s presidency was a kind of vacuum of seriousness: the relationship between means and ends was practically non-existent. If Trump had wanted Congress to do his bidding and reverse the result of the election it would have taken a monumental strong-arm operation of persuasion and coercion, the sort to make even Lyndon Johnson ...”

“... for Physics with Schrödinger, and remains one of the youngest recipients. Though he was by no means finished as a physicist by this point – he continued to produce important, intriguing work in quantum theory and cosmology, most of which would bear fruit only later in the hands of others – the five-year period following his dissertation was one of the ...”

“... The programme of the moderate nationalists, he believes, can only be fulfilled by the most extreme means. This is what makes Kahane ideologically dangerous: he can claim that his policies only represent the logical extension of generally accepted nationalist principles – such as, in the case of Israel, the need for a Jewish majority. The extent of Kahane’s ...”

“... in a South American language, and other events entirely inexplicable except by supernatural means. But the sceptics were unconvinced. And they were right. The day after the prioress testified against Grandier, she condemned herself (she dressed in a shirt, with a rope around her neck and a candle in her hand, and stood in a public place, mimicking the ...”

“... for a pee, and contemplating all the other things he can do on his own, ‘not one’ of which ‘means “work”’. Larkin, that ‘nine to five man who had seen poetry’, needed his ‘toad, work’ to spare him the terrors of the blank page, especially in the years after ‘Aubade’, when blank is what the page remained, no matter how long he stared at ...”

“... set the members at odds with the leadership of the Alliance and represented a direct rebuke of David Owen’s much more hawkish SDP. Labour was different. ‘The Labour Party will never die’ was one of Thatcher’s mantras. What Labour did mattered because it was the only alternative party of government. And in this case the party members were in tune ...”

“... manifesto that came to be known as the Limehouse Declaration. When Roy Jenkins, Shirley Williams, David Owen and I met together that morning, we were clear in our intention: in breaking the mould of contemporary politics, we would create a new radical centre, push the Labour Party into third place, change the electoral system and usher in an era of ...”

“... last years of Mrs Thatcher’s reign it was Perec, not Sollers, who – with the publication of David Bellos’s translation of Life: A User’s Manual – found a keen British audience. There were logics in these things, as we shall see. Perec’s reputation might easily have crossed the Channel two decades earlier. His first novel, Les Choses, was ...”

“... were digging. Usually, that kind of complicity should be enough to guarantee silence. But it also means that once someone decides to spill the beans, it’s because they’ve decided there is nothing left to lose. This certainly appears to be the case with Andrew Young, whose stomach-churning, jaw-dropping account of his time spent working for, befriending ...”

“... say, the Spectator. The interview with Macpherson is followed by an article on immigration by David Coleman (the reader in demography at Oxford rather than the sports commentator). He is worried that ‘a long national tradition, developed over many centuries, could diminish for no better reason than its inability to control its own borders.’ It isn’t ...”