“... in Britain who you’d be interested in – they’re very internationalist and Vietnam is our major priority.’ I met some of these comrades, and I said: ‘Not that I’m bothered, because I like what you write, and particularly what he writes, but how many members do you have?’ And they looked at each other, a look which said: ‘Should we tell him ...”

“... and reads like a Fifties novel of provincial life, though not one written by him so much as by John Wain or Keith Waterhouse. Indeed Ruth sounds (or Larkin makes her sound) like Billy Liar’s unsatisfactory girlfriend, whose snog-inhibiting Jaffa Billy hurls to the other end of the cemetery. Having laid out a grand total of 15s. 7d. on an evening with ...”

“... in defence of natural habitats and biodiversity. In the early 1990s Earth First! was involved in major road protests around Newbury (the bypass), Twyford Down (the M3) and the M11. Hundreds of people joined the camps ‘day after day’, as the women of Greenham Common had. In 1995, Londoners in Earth First! began a campaign to ‘reclaim the ...”

“... signed by its sender and encrypted to its receiver’. The public key, or address, is matched, as John Lanchester handily described it in the LRB, to ‘a private key which provides access to that address’. A key is really just a string of numbers and digits: the public key demonstrates ownership of any given address; the private key can only be used by the ...”

“... Labour’s levels of borrowing on the eve of the crash compared favourably with those of John Major’s Conservative government in the early 1990s; and – even if Labour’s petting of the financial sector had left Britain overexposed – in his Keynesian response to the crisis, Gordon Brown had pulled the economy back from the brink of ...”

“... the angle of attack was political science, economics, law, sociology, philosophy or history, the major contributions – Haas, Moravcsik, Schmitter, Eichengreen, Weiler, Fligstein, Siedentop, Gillingham – came from the United States, with a singleton from England before its accession to the Common Market, in the pioneering reconstruction of Alan ...”

“... I see his loving gaze falling on the objects in it: a conch shell on a side table, a painting by John Piper (a wedding gift). Home is never a neutral place, it is a very specific context, an animated expression of the presence it contains. Why can’t it be loved?‘You can’t love an inanimate object.’ I don’t know where he got the sentence from. My ...”

“... I saw quite a bit in the old days. He captained several teams, including the England team, at the major tournaments, and after he’d picked Colin for one of these events – I hasten to add he’d picked me before he picked your father – they became friends. We were all friends, I suppose. You may not remember Graham, but he was Maureen’s first ...”

“... was first called ‘narratology’. And it is impossible not to admire the ingenuity of such major narratological practitioners as Roland Barthes and Gérard Genette. In Forster’s Aspects of the Novel the only other passage as famous as the one about flat and round characters is the one that distinguishes between story and plot. He makes it sound ...”

“... industrial revolution’, it would ‘level up’ the ‘industrial heartlands’. It was ‘a major boost’ and ‘a resounding vote of confidence’. It would ‘unlock investment’. In an especially tired cliché engendered by the very technology the batteries were supposed to abolish, it would help ‘turbocharge the local economy’.No batteries ...”

“... commissioned a comprehensive survey of refugee movements. To superintend the project, it appointed John Hope Simpson, a persuasive and highly energetic man who had worked in India and Palestine, directed National Food Relief policy in China and served as vice-president of the Refugee Settlement Commission in Athens. Simpson’s mainstay in France was ...”

“... trial from January to June 2024, when the jury was discharged because they couldn’t agree on the major charges, and returned for the retrial, which began in March 2025 and lasted more than four months. I spent nearly a year in the company of the judge, the barristers for the prosecution and for the defence, the police assigned to the case, two ...”