“... five exemplars, and pictures their lives and their probable futures with dry wit and what readers may have felt was an unusually fine grasp of detail. His types hover somewhere between reportage and fiction, each showing a different reaction when offered a bath by their client in his ‘nicely furnished bachelor apartment’. Len ‘ungraciously accepts, on ...”

“... is what moves his naturalism beyond pessimistic determinism. The actions and circumstances of man may be understood as a product of his biology and social environment, but through careful study of these forces we can choose to act in ways that counter them. Therefore, Zola’s naturalism not only holds that one can shape and change one’s fate, but that it ...”

“... the world of ‘my mother’s taste’. My whole life up to now – as even the slow-witted reader may have deduced – has from one angle been a fairly heartless repudiation of maternal sentimentality: all the bright, powerless, feminine things. Now especially, her world is largely one of kitty cats, splashy floral bedspreads and pillow shams, Mrs See’s ...”

“... in the flats above and below don’t even know there’s been a fire. This was something else.’ Richard Welsh is a senior officer with the London Fire Brigade. His pager went off at 1.18 a.m. ‘Initially they had six machines there,’ he said. ‘Then they asked for eight, and then ten, and then 15, 20, and then 25. I’m hearing that on the way there, so ...”

“... out) they are in operation.There are also two romances in play. The first is industrial: these may be the last merchant ships the Clyde ever builds and therefore ‘ane end o’ ane auld sang’ in the phrase used to describe the end of Scottish sovereignty in 1707. The second is Hebridean: the fifty inhabited islands that make their ragged pattern off the ...”

“... reproduces two registration cards from the Drancy camp. René Lévy, born in France on 27 May 1934, arrested as part of the ‘Allg. Massnahmen gegen Juden’ (‘general measures against Jews’) is released despite both his grandparents being Jewish, because his mother was an Aryan. His card is marked, in pencil, ‘Libéré’. Ten-month-old ...”

“... along one social or cultural dimension can produce a given assessment, comparison along others may generate different judgments. None yields an all-purpose standard. The Baltic republics had enjoyed a number of past advantages under tsarism which in different ways had persisted after their reincorporation in the Soviet Union. Protestant and Catholic ...”

“... whose lectures he attended; gripped by the engagé theatre of Sartre and Camus, and the novels of Richard Wright and Chester Himes. He was also reading Jaspers, Nietzsche, Hegel, Bergson, Bachelard and Lacan – the ‘logician of madness’, he called him, partly in jest. He dreaded the ‘larval, stocky, obsolete life that awaits me once I’ve finished my ...”

“... their say under the rubric ‘Forum’. As well as Foot, Harrisson and King-Hall, they included Richard Crossman, George Orwell and E.F. Schumacher. Garvin, who was fiercely pro-Churchill, wrote in his diary that these unwelcome contributors were ‘carpers, crabbers, grousers, disappointed prigs, pedants, muddlers, moonstruck dreamers … the people who ...”

“... football pitches, changing rooms erected to replace shower blocks opened in the dark ages by Wendy Richard of EastEnders. Back in the 1820s Gas Company funds were misappropriated, illegal payments made to council officials and stock accounts falsified. Now, in more enlightened times, when bureaucratic malpractice is exposed and celebrated every ...”

“... Quinn and her parents – father a long-distance lorry driver, mother a worker at the Bryant & May match factory – had rented the downstairs floor of a private terraced house in Usher Road, Bow, a land of cobblestones, cigarette smoke, crowded pubs and crowded bedrooms, backyard privies and tin baths filled with water heated on the range. Usher Road was ...”

“... of the Chinese Labour Corps, some civilian victims of a daylight air-raid on Folkestone on 25 May 1917, in which 95 people were killed and 195 injured.)1 I guess an obsession is defined, crudely enough, by the fact that one doesn’t understand it. Even as it besets, its determinants remain opaque. (The word ‘obsession’, interestingly, is originally a ...”

“... more than 16 hours to be admitted. An A&E consultant at the Royal Stoke University Hospital, Dr Richard Fawcett, broadcast his frustration on Twitter. ‘It breaks my heart,’ he wrote, ‘to see so many frail and elderly patients in the corridor for hours and hours … I personally apologise to the people of Stoke for the Third World conditions of the ...”

“... a residual sense of rivalry with him, his second-in-command, Abdullah Gul, acting as premier, may not have pulled out all the stops. Two months later, Erdogan had entered parliament and taken charge. Once premier, he rammed through a vote to dispatch Turkish troops to take part in the occupation of Iraq. By this time it was too late, and the offer was ...”