“... incidents like this punctuated my afternoons. I was working at the City Academy in Hackney, a brand-new comprehensive built to replace Homerton House Boys’ School, which had become notorious for ill-discipline and gang activity. Rather than try to reform what was there, the idea was to knock the whole thing down and start again, using central government ...”

“... of the ancients. Strauss’s views or versions of them were alive and well in the persons of William Bennett, Lynne Cheney, Chester Finn, Dianne Ravitch and Quayle chief of staff William Kristol, and it is at least arguable that these and others close to the Administration were able to influence its ...”

“... and certain others are intended not to know. Information doesn’t want to be free – as Stewart Brand put it in the 1980s – but it does often require a lot of effort to select the things to keep close, to guard and administer them, and, eventually, to thin out the stock of secrets and let some of them loose. Stores of secrets are supposed to be ...”

“... vestry, a town hall, is remembered and recorded. The work of the architects (Caesar Augustus Long, William Hunt, A.G. Cross) responsible for its development and redevelopment is acknowledged. More recent exploitations of a building denied any proper function since the 1980s are ignored. No notices commemorate ‘Whirlygig’ club nights when New Age ravers ...”

“... than an hour one morning the invented friends of Ronnie Pinn came into being. They had names like William Eliot, Jane Deleon and Stephen Watley, and who’s to say they weren’t ‘real’. After a while, an alarm bell went off somewhere, and Facebook sent a warning. ‘Please verify your identity,’ it said. ‘Facebook does not allow accounts ...”

“... bad-trip imagery, like the cut-up technique Bowie used to compose the lyrics, is borrowed from William Burroughs. The title song is introduced with a toe-curling yell of: ‘This ain’t rock’n’roll, this is genocide!’ But that’s soon forgotten in the gloriously overlong, overripe, decadent mess of anarchic guitars, squelching horns and exuberant ...”

“... about Kurt Cobain in ‘About a Boy’, and elsewhere referenced the deaths of two of her mentors, William Burroughs and Allen Ginsberg. The sleeve of Gung Ho (2000) was the first not to feature her own portrait, replacing it with an old snapshot of her late father. She seemed to be securing some kind of future by assessing her past (a not uncommon manoeuvre ...”

“... land with the look: ‘somehow we have not been very successful in life’; and this park itself, brand-new, a made-island of green in all this grave ocean, and in this silence, a little noise. The leaves are blown aslant and in their shade a few lie prostrate on young grass, mothers, young girls, two boys together; and meditate, or talk inaudibly; on ...”

“... longest-serving prime minister, overtaking Ben-Gurion. Israeli democracy, the marketing man’s brand, has fallen into terminal discredit among liberals in the West, but he has never cared what liberals think, and they have far less influence in an era of populist demagoguery. Trump, Putin, Modi, Orbán: Netanyahu could hardly be more at home in a world of ...”

“... problem, the problem of evil. Psychoanalysis and socialism, not to mention Wilde’s particular brand of flagrant theatricality, were, for Eliot, inadequate responses to original sin. For the men of the 1890s, Eliot wrote in 1928, ‘evil was very good fun. Experience, as a sequence of outward events, is nothing in itself; it is possible to pass through the ...”

“... fitted the mythology of rugged individualism he mimicked and tried to sell as intrinsic to his brand. Launched as a front and junior partner for the tainted Fred Trump in Manhattan real estate, he had been on gaudy display in New York since he first crossed the Queensboro Bridge with $14 million from his father. ‘My father gave me a very small loan in ...”

“... the Future wasn’t so much part of ‘working through the past’ as an attempt to ‘protect the brand’ – the sort of thing a company does when confronted with an embarrassing or damaging incident. The fund was set up, Gerhard Schröder said, to end ‘the campaign being led against German industry and our country’. Such management of historical ...”

“... new Westwood Cross shopping centre, only two – a burger joint and a store selling boast-brand accessories – aren’t part of retail chains headquartered elsewhere. Westwood Cross has sucked the life out of Ramsgate’s high street, where the branches of the big banks look isolated among derelict shopfronts, charity shops, junk shops, pound shops ...”

“... the Mississippi and Lake Champlain. Scotland’s great contribution came from the engineer William Symington, whose paddle steamer Charlotte Dundas, built in 1801, was a mechanical triumph let down in the end by his nervous backers (though it encouraged the later schemes of Fulton and Bell). Compared with Symington, Bell was the lesser engineer and the ...”

“... among them Orwell, who put aside his loathing of British imperialism – so strong, according to William Empson, that he initially ‘felt Hitler’s war would be worthwhile if it spelt the end of the British Raj’ – to broadcast its merits to India. After attending a six-week training course dubbed ‘the Liars’ School’, he became a talks producer ...”