“... results so the rest of us can put a figure on how much richer we feel, or how much poorer.The price collectors’ task is to measure the cost of goods in the UK. Not the cost of living – a confusion that excites statisticians’ displeasure – but the cost of a defined basket of goods. The contents of the basket, updated each year by the Office of ...”

“... but they are by now, all of them, in academic retirement. Of the cohort which follows them, Jack Goody is one of the leading figures. In Eastern Europe, there is a joke about the current generation of Communist leaders which says that its coming was predicted in the Bible: ‘Then came a generation which knew not Joseph.’ ...”

“... the family’s affections by making them eternally grateful to her?’) and of asking a nominal price: ‘£10,000? She had no right to it ... it could be seen as an act of selling herself out of the family. And that was the very last thing she wanted.’ Her siblings are meanwhile busy pilfering the hotel’s contents and tattling on one another by ...”

“... of improving shipboard conditions but in fact was intended to stall emigration by raising the price of the fare. In this way, migration was at first limited by poverty, and the introduction of the potato made it possible for the dispossessed to stay put. The victims of eviction crowded into already congested townships and the population was rearranged ...”

“... of money is applied at the bottom layer of the housing market, Bano says, it sets the base price for property in any particular area, pushing up the value of higher-quality homes.The suggestion that what we have come to call the housing crisis is primarily a matter of price rather than availability has drawn ...”

“... The item which seems set to stay longest with me from Ian Jack’s alert and precisely-written record of British life in the Seventies and Eighties comes from the opening memoir of his father, which supplies a deeper soil, or subsoil, to the son’s coverage of more recent matters for the Sunday Times and (since Wapping) the Observer: Few of his workplaces survive ...”

“... see to things for their invalid mother – and all this while quite young girls ... They paid the price of having a father who did not earn enough. The letter had little effect on his son, who half-heartedly offered to change the offending word to ‘troubled’ when the piece, entitled ‘Four Years’, was published in book form, but it is an accurate ...”

“... have change from a pound? Answer: the London Borough of Westminster. Boom boom. This makes the price of a pint of beer in 1986 slightly less than 85p. The cemeteries, in Hanwell, East Finchley and Mill Hill, whose upkeep was the responsibility of the Highways and Works Committee of Westminster City Council, were sold by the council for 5p each. Aside from ...”

“... sang it well                    (‘Lest we forget’): With a hey, jolly Jack, with a hey. When the dead walked in Larkin’s heyday, and the living                    were made of cardboard. With a bang, with a whimper, the world ends, or with a yelp ... with a hey ... lion’s whelp wagging a flag: Burgess in the ...”

“... and urged him to share ‘the beautiful women of Cape Cod’ with his recently married brother Jack. Indeed, Perry writes, Joe Sr ‘modelled the very sort of immoral behaviour that Jack and Teddy embraced’. By ‘immoral behaviour’ Perry means Joe’s legendary philandering, which Nasaw dismisses as conduct that ...”

“... poor communities’. During the First World War the summer traffic more or less vanished and the price of fuel – steam coal was badly needed by the Royal Navy – rose steeply: facing large losses, the company begged for more money ‘otherwise the Mail services will automatically cease’. Soon there was talk of a government takeover, which was eventually ...”

“... provide keys to otherwise puzzling patterns of behaviour. Among the persisting values discussed in Jack Gray’s Rebellions and Revolutions are those of collective responsibility, respect for the elderly, economic egalitarianism and outward conformity to the changing dictates of authority. Surprisingly, neither Spence nor Gray mentions how the traditional ...”

“... I’m only 14!This plainly displeased him. You could say Murph was my unofficial guardian,The Jack Teagarden to my Stan Getz, sans horns, a somewhat unsavory coupling,And one not without implications down the road …But you can imagine how purgatorial, that rolling, rackety, fitful journey uptownAfter the 25 minutes pinned back in the death seat beside ...”

“... undemanding exemplars of legends. At one party he is quite near to someone who might just count: Jack Nicholson. He asks Fergie (the former Duchess of York) how he can get talking to the ‘superstar’. Don’t tell him you’re a journalist, says Fergie, better say you’re something interesting like a bank robber. Our compulsively cheeky ...”

“... Madison’s caution, that ‘power is also opportunity, and to face danger with confidence is the price of its fulfilment.’ His polemical text, The American Presidency, concluded with a plea to give to the President ‘the power commensurate with the function he has to perform’. Only in this way could what he termed ‘the American adventure’ hope to ...”