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“... where excessive wealth is the norm and, because self-pity is the defining vice of the metropolitan rich, is seen as barely adequate to cover the costs of thieving tradesmen, children who want it all and nannies who are little better than extortionists in Peter Jones aprons. Labour, Mandelson said just before his fall, was ‘intensely relaxed about people ...”

“... Adrienne Rich’s​ poems speak so strongly to the current zeitgeist (dating from, say, the Occupy movement through #MeToo to Black Lives Matter) that it’s astounding – no, instructive – to realise they were written twenty, forty, fifty years ago:at your tabletelephone ringsevery four minutestalkof terrible thingsthe papers bringingno good news                                (‘New York’)False history gets made all day, any day,the truth of the new is never on the news                                (‘Turning the Wheel’)There is a cop who is both prowler and father …You have to confessto him, you are guilty of the crimeof having been forced                                (‘Rape’)Suppose you want to writeof a woman braidinganother woman’s hair –straight down, or with beads and shellsin three-strand plaits or corn-rows –you had better know the thicknessthe length the patternwhy she decides to braid her hairhow it is done to herwhat country it happens inwhat else happens in that country                                (‘North American Time’)Her essays employ an argot that contemporary opinion pieces might have cribbed from: ‘The creative energy of patriarchy is fast running out; what remains is its self-generating energy for destruction ...”

“... of Ford which treats the war as the natural division in his career, has pulled together a rich variety of reflections on conflict and its aftermath. These are, as it were, notes for the war memoir Ford might have written, but didn’t. Whether conceived as fiction, reminiscence, essay, lecture, preface or letter, they all move, as Saunders puts ...”

“... was Margaret Thatcher’s mini-me; they were even both the daughters of grocers, though Jack Cohen’s Tesco proved to be a more lasting success than Alderman Roberts’s shop in Grantham. Porter rode high in public and party esteem thanks to a passionately media-friendly campaign to clear the streets of litter, and then by keeping Westminster rates ...”

“... power for the sake of more power. He was born in 1888 in New Haven, Connecticut. His mother, Bella Cohen Moses, was a strong-willed woman like her own mother, the ‘flashingly imperious’ Rosalie Silverman Cohen. The Cohens were part of the German-Jewish elite that profited from mercantile enterprise, assimilated to ...”

“... most cunning and ruthless manipulators of wealth, and they also know how to charm the old rich, key sources of supply. When they deal in the work of living artists they shape the careers of some of the most charismatic and paranoid individuals of their time. Their operations tend to sail dramatically close to the wind of commercial ethics and ...”

“... there is a historical accumulation of resentments against the entire group. Tutsi simply means ‘rich in cattle’, while Hutu means ‘servant’, and Hutu resentments are typically those of any underclass: an anger against past social injustices, a partly justified belief that all Tutsis condescend to them and prevailed on their Belgian colonial masters to ...”

“... I’m sure without any allusive intent, in Larry Charles’s The Dictator, starring Sacha Baron Cohen as the evil Oriental Admiral General Aladeen. An eager American dissident says the police in her country are fascists. ‘Yes,’ our hero says, ‘but not in a good way.’ Still, in spite of the echo, there is no real American or English tradition of ...”

“... showing in the 2005 parliamentary elections. Liberal champions, notably Nicholas Kristof and Roger Cohen in the New York Times, applauded the protesters for focusing on Egypt, rather than on America or Israel: the ‘Arab mind’, Cohen declared, was at last showing signs of maturity, shedding its obsession with American and ...”

“... precisely in his ability to bridge gaps, between urban workers and suburban professionals, between rich and poor, between white and black and Latino. By his willingness to change and to transcend the standard political categories, Tye’s Kennedy could have become America’s ‘high priest of reconciliation’. The seventh of the nine children of Joseph and ...”

“... autism should be treated by psychoanalysis. Kanner was not wholly wrong, by the way. Simon Baron-Cohen, the best-known British autism researcher today, has a research programme to investigate the extent to which the family trees of autists are made up of engineers, scientists and other abstract thinkers whose lives revolve around cold structures rather than ...”

“... tells her that derivatives are ‘freakish’ – straightforward gambling contracts. The Leonard Cohen song ‘Everybody Knows’ is his theme tune: everybody knows that what they’re doing is sleazy, risky and untenable; everybody knows that someday it’s going to implode. Getting the world of work right in fiction is difficult. Get bogged down in mundane ...”

“... leak many of the biggest albums of the decade, including Lil Wayne’s Tha Carter, 50 Cent’s Get Rich or Die Tryin’ and Kanye West’s The College Dropout, at a time which, in retrospect, looks like the mainstream music industry’s last hurrah. He was, in Witt’s estimation, ‘the most fearsome digital pirate of them all’. In the 1990s, when he was in ...”

“... 1970s, the anti-regulatory policies of Reagan and Thatcher promoted a new class of the super-rich, some of whom became very visible collectors. Naturally, they favoured market-proven painting and sculpture over more experimental and critical forms. Charles Saatchi, an early backer of Hirst, was alert not only to the new investment potential of ...”

“... of travelling around Central Europe as a freelance reporter and learned German, while other ‘rich Americans had ignored Europe, except as a playground, since the Armistice.’ Who could have guessed that the region would become of interest to so many Americans again, and so soon?Time magazine, which put Thompson on the cover in 1939, was more ...”