“... Y-e-a-h!’ It’s crowded with names (Dizzy Gillespie, Sammy Davis, Marian Anderson, Paul Robeson), with flashing neon (WONDER BAR, CASBAH, SHALIMAR), with headlines, snatches of speech, children’s rhymes, lists of goods for sale (‘Groceries/Suits/Fruits/Watches/Diamond rings/THE DAILY NEWS’), with ...”

“... to tidy up Christianity. He found Benjamin Jowett’s Hegelised Plato a poor substitute for St Paul and skipped Matthew Arnold’s poetry lectures because they clashed with cricket matches. All the same, he thrived. He won a fellowship at Merton. He translated French roundelays and befriended Walter Pater. It was a world in which everybody seemed to know ...”

“... was different this time was that he wasn’t able to take the key players in his party with him. Johnson’s defection was perhaps to be expected – though Cameron does not appear to have prepared for it – but Gove’s was not. Had Cameron known that his decision would split the Tory Party at the very top, including his own inner circle, it might have ...”

“... on a single, dreadful act that gives them the excuse they need to gun the engines of oppression. Paul Foot London All I have to offer, in this distracted time, are stray thoughts and overheard lines. First, from my 14-year-old son, after several days of bluster about ‘righteous’ war: ‘“Evil” is what you talk about when you can’t explain what ...”

“... years, as has Londoners’ fear of crime, though the increase began around the midpoint of Boris Johnson’s second term as mayor. Police data on knife crime with injury suggests a downward trend since 2017 but, that said, few doubt the seriousness of the issue. Khan’s response has been to stress central government cuts to police budgets, and the sales of ...”

“... defeated though it was, and in part because of the restraints imposed on it by Kennedy, Johnson and Nixon, was in retrospect an essential and noble demonstration to the world, and especially to the Communists, that America was determined even under the most daunting circumstances to fight against any expansion anywhere of Communist domination. Howe ...”

“... impressively for his gear. CNN was here for some really significant story – the marriage of Sir Paul McCartney and anti-landmine campaigner Heather Mills, perhaps; a shade less probably, the wedding in St Eugene’s Cathedral, Londonderry, of Gráinne, daughter of Northern Ireland’s Education Minister Martin McGuinness (not yet knighted for his varied ...”

“... said, his greatness and his doom indistinguishable. It reads more like art than life, but then as Paul Delany reminded us in a recent article in this journal (24 January), life ‘too is “written” – shaped, selected, mythologised – by the same rules that govern the creation of literary texts’. Here, each of the countless fragments of memory out of ...”

“... of Sea Power upon History (1890), we might stress the derring-do of the Royal Navy, or – as Paul Kennedy did recently – the role of public finance. Brewer concentrates on organisational factors, and isolates three that were crucial. First and foremost, Britain’s army and navy trebled in size in the century after the Glorious Revolution. By the ...”

“... deconstructive reading is an interpretation of the text, an analysis of what it says or means.’ Paul de Man and J. Hillis Miller, according to Culler, have turned deconstruction into a ‘methodological principle’ by which semantic ‘undecidability’ is, as Miller puts it, ‘always thematised in the text itself ...’ In other words, deconstructionist ...”

“... via French structuralist writings, towards the deconstructive philosophies of Derrida and Paul de Man. Miller became part of what had become known by the late 1970s as the ‘Yale School’ of criticism, primarily identified with deconstruction (Derrida, de Man, Miller; as well as Shoshana Felman and Barbara ...”

“... active in radical politics for the next thirty-odd years. At the age of 19 he married Sarah Johnson, his landlady’s daughter, and she brought him enough money to establish himself in Lambeth as a bookseller and stationer. He campaigned among other things for a new, more humane system of poor relief, improvement in the management of lunatic ...”

“... By the end of the sequence it’s clear that only someone like the unctuous and obnoxious Canon Paul Fenneau is still talking about the music of time: ‘To those familiar with the rhythm of living there are few surprises in this world.’ To everyone else, there is scarcely anything except surprises. Jenkins even manages, while on military service during ...”

“... lore had Warhol moving into bed with his mother while his father slept upstairs with Paul and John [Warhol’s siblings],’ Gopnik writes. When Julia moved to New York to live with her son, people ‘thought she was stupid’, a friend said, ‘but she was brilliant beyond belief … and much smarter than Andy.’In high school, Warhol was not ...”

“... soft power, and an indication that it should continue to offer free licences to the over-75s. Johnson floated the idea of a licence fee review during the campaign: it looked at the time like unsubtle intimidation, or cheap showmanship. His refusal to be interviewed by Andrew Neil, and his insistence that ministers boycott the Today programme (now ...”