“... politics before getting on with the play proper. The characters are largely historical. Margaret Nicholson’s attempt on the King’s life was in 1786, not just before his illness as in the play, but it is certainly true, as the King remarks, that in France she would not have got off so lightly. As it was, she lived on in Bedlam long after the ...”

“... setting up independent discussion groups in the region. His main task, he thought as he slowly rose through the party apparatus, was to find new local leaders who could at least make the existing system work. Fyodor Kulakov, Stavropol’s first secretary, made an unsuccessful pass at Raisa, but he appreciated her husband’s energy and steadily promoted ...”

“... became even worse in the course of the decade. In September 1978, just a few months after Margaret Thatcher claimed to understand why English men and women might feel their country was being ‘swamped’ by Commonwealth immigrants, the National Front moved its central offices from Teddington in West London to Great Eastern Street, a few ...”

“... wanted to go over this last weekend,’ said Midgley. ‘I would have gone over if your Margaret hadn’t suddenly descended.’ ‘You knew they were coming. They’d been coming for weeks. It’s one of the few things Mother’s got to look forward to.’ Mrs Midgley’s mother was standing staring out of the window. ‘Don’t blame our ...”

“... It was an ecstatic evening, from the royal arrival just after nine until ‘at 1.45 the king rose and I showed him to his car … it was the very peak, the summit, I suppose of social superiority, the King of England and the Kents etc to dine, to dine with me.’ (Channon was puzzled when the king said ‘I want to pump shit,’ presumably a mishearing ...”

“... targeted at Black people), and while the incomes of the wealthiest 1 per cent of Americans rose by 75 per cent, for the bottom 90 per cent the increase was just 7 per cent. The middle class was shrinking as income was redistributed upwards. But none of that mattered in 1984. As one of Reagan’s campaign managers, Lee Atwater, reminded his ...”

“... as avant-garde. The homosexuals and pornographers, male and female, dominate the scene.’ Others rose above the gay panic, preserving a semblance of judicial decorum as they sought to relegate Sontag to the novelty department, the repository of passing fads. In his landmark zoological study ‘The New York Intellectuals’, published in Dissent in ...”

“... of a shelf of towers. Michael Heseltine, a wild-haired, mad-eyed visionary (Klaus Kinski to Margaret Thatcher’s Werner Herzog), pushed Docklands across the Thames to the East Greenwich Peninsula, Bugsby’s Marshes. The obsessive, neurotic and delusional Millennium Dome concept was a remake of Fitzcarraldo, a film in which suborned natives (expendable ...”

“... the idea that those who came to maturity in these years were ‘socially mobile’: that they rose to a higher position in society than their (working-class) parents. And it was of course true that these changes, along with rising prosperity and better public services, did improve the lives of large sections of the population, though the class position of ...”

“... inflation rocketed. HBO went for high-selling literary novelists, signing up Jeffrey Eugenides, Margaret Atwood and Jonathan Safran Foer. ‘HBO gained a reputation for going through pilots like Kleenex,’ Biskind writes.He estimates Amazon will have scant change from a billion dollars for its Rings of Power series, based on Tolkien’s lesser-known ...”

“... the word    In a minor thirdThere is none but the cuckoo knows;    Heaps of the guelder rose!I must bear with it, I suppose.It is a curious fact that Browning is a master of the art of minor thirds – curious, given his equally real character in the brisk and boisterous vein, a producer of poems like ‘Waring’ which still (to my mind) amuse and ...”

“... Azadeh Moaveni, Toril Moi, Joanne O’Leary, Niela Orr, Lauren Oyler, Susan Pedersen, Jacqueline Rose, Madeleine Schwartz, Arianne Shahvisi, Sophie Smith, Rebecca Solnit, Alice Spawls, Amia Srinivasan, Chaohua Wang, Marina Warner, Bee Wilson, Emily Witt Elif BatumanWhen​ Roe v. Wade was overturned, I was finishing the tour for my new ...”

“... Or forwards, conjecturing the future fate of the Second World War. In St Paul’s: We rose once more for another hymn, ‘Now thank we all our God’, which was, I felt pretty sure, of German origin. Whoever was responsible for choosing it had either forgotten that, or judged it peculiarly apposite for this reason. We had just prayed for the ...”

“... affecting the climate or impoverishing us. But as a result of actions taken a generation ago by Margaret Thatcher’s Conservatives – a party whose nationalist programme promised independence from Europe – the decisions aren’t Britain’s alone. Thatcher promised less state involvement in industry but the future of Britain’s energy supply now hinges ...”

“... of the president, José Eduardo dos Santos, who assumed office in an age of strongmen, between Margaret Thatcher’s first election victory in 1979 and Robert Mugabe’s in 1980. Thirty-six years later Dos Santos is still in power. Under his supervision, Angola is not just a development star, but a model of elite self-enrichment and wealth disparity. There ...”