“... line’ of 1985 has turned into a global earth-shift. In his contribution to Shafted, Michael Bailey argues that since the spectre of socialism and historical materialism continues to haunt society, it’s legitimate to invoke Walter Benjamin, to keep ‘control of that memory’, and to ‘blast open the continuum of history’. Tony Benn, in his ...”

“... is still a wilderness,’ writes Lawson-Peebles in apparent agreement with John Quincy Adams and Joseph Hall, both of whom had scorned the ‘edenic’ fables told about the West. But is it? Yes, in the sense that you can still starve or freeze or get eaten in it. But we’re talking about writing and reading here. To an audience familiar with the King James ...”

“... struck her as being almost subhuman. For she feared the power of the sex instinct. Her affair with Joseph Chamberlain had been unforgettably painful, suggesting perhaps that, far from being an integrated character with no divisions of soul, she was sexually attracted by men to whom she was intellectually hostile. One of the effects of her attachment to ...”

“... simple remedies and evangelical tone. But her confident certainties are echoed on the other side: Michael Foot condemns her for praising Victorian values ‘without even a passing comprehension of the human suffering and indignity which the mass of our people had to endure in that pre-democratic age’. The term ‘Victorian’ is used purely descriptively in ...”

“... the ‘excess of zeal’ with which he rushed to make the mistaken attribution (the great Joseph wrote only the finale, the rest was by his middling younger brother Michael), and adding the testimony of a German refugee doctor to whom the by now mortally sick Tovey confided his favourite composer (‘he became ...”

“... attack everything, even God, because he is master. They should be hung like housebreakers.’ Thus Joseph de Maistre (1754-1821), Savoyard philosopher, counter-revolutionary, ultramontane Catholic and the first of six exemplars of anti-liberal sentiment, past and present, chosen by Stephen Holmes for dissection in his Anatomy. The others are Carl Schmitt, Leo ...”

“... prose to celestial poetry. (They hadn’t read, these promoters of the Penman in Hollywood fable, Michael Moorcock’s minatory letters to J.G. Ballard, the grind of lost years and aborted projects.) So, obviously, when I met Penman, this Schrader yarn was the one I put to him. Why did he come back? Where did it all go wrong? The truth was less ...”

“... Confidential Inquiry under the provisions of the National Health Service Act 1977, chaired by Michael Redfern QC. Its procedure, the Secretary of State determined, would be inquisitorial. Its terms of reference were, in essence, to find out what had happened at Alder Hey. Although Redfern’s Report, which was published in January, says that its main ...”

“... there are forms of religion, commerce, finance and military action that bear comparison – but Michael Gordin argues that Babel has long been a special problem for science and that science, in turn, has had a special role in coping with it and in trying to overcome it. Scientists wish to, and sometimes need to, communicate with their peers all over the ...”

“... shared a building with National Lampoon. Kincaid struck up a conversation with one of its writers, Michael O’Donoghue, who suggested she meet his friend George Trow, a staff writer at the New Yorker. Trow organised a lunch with Kincaid and William Shawn, then editor of the New Yorker, at the Algonquin. Kincaid ordered the most expensive item on the menu ...”

“... and talks of quitting.’By 1937, the Germans were putting a great deal of pressure on him, too. Joseph Goebbels wrote in his diary that Ebbutt was ‘a real German-hater and an enemy of National Socialism’. A second attempt was made to get the Times to replace him, with a German diplomat telling the Foreign Office that Ebbutt was ‘not making any real ...”

“... The abolition of the ILEA was undertaken in the same insouciant manner as that of the GLC. Keith Joseph, who shared most of the Prime Minister’s prejudices against it, was nonetheless convinced that it had to exist; it therefore survived Mrs Thatcher’s ‘reorganisation’ of London government. It could not, however, survive her need (and the need of ...”

“... demand side. As the eloquent and – in the social context of pre-1914 Vienna – courageous rabbi Joseph Bloch put it, ‘one must have seen the misery of the Polish Jewish cities for oneself, in order to understand that a trip to Buenos Aires is not frightening.’ Life expectancy was low – it was always a choice between VD abroad or malnutrition at home ...”

“... discovered how to keep diabetic dogs alive with extracts of pancreas. An excellent recent study by Michael Bliss,* a historian at the University of Toronto, establishes that a. the dogs were probably kept alive because Banting, in trying to make them diabetic, failed to remove their own pancreases entirely; b. Banting and Best did little that hadn’t already ...”

“... precision of ‘nova’. Suddenly she seemed to have read a lot of books. She refers to Joseph Conrad, William Golding’s Pincher Martin and Walker Percy’s The Moviegoer. Morvern’s palette has expanded to encompass the Updikean spectrum of emerald, cyan and tangerine. She uses the word ‘whorls’. That this was Alan Warner’s voice rather ...”