“... there is a joke here somewhere, though one almost certain to be missed.The members of the educated class, lamenting the loss of territories, markets, ports, transportation and other key assets after China’s defeat in the Opium Wars, moved to modernise the state. Mastering telecommunications, at a time when the rapid transmission of information was remaking ...”

“... of Northern Ireland, the part of the province that voted Leave. Banners commemorated First World War battles and the UVF, which was formed in 1912 to resist Home Rule. One had the slogan ‘prepared for peace, ready for war’, the words of a mural in an area of Belfast dominated by the reincarnated UVF during the ...”

“... few Jews among the labour movement’s earnest Christians’, but as an unquestioned upper-middle-class Jew, of neither Sephardic nor German origin, who was as reluctant as older Jewry to identify with what (speaking of the Zionist mathematician Selig Brodetsky, hero of poor immigrant boys in public libraries) he considered ‘the worst type of East End ...”

“... personal appearance, urbanity and arrogance, in part to a perceived discrepancy between his upper-class background and his radical politics (cf. Tony Benn), and in part to persistent accusations and rumours that he was soft on the Russians, if not a KGB mole. But, critics have asked, would a lone madman susceptible to violent anti-Palme feelings carry out the ...”

“... For much of its history Labour has not been greatly interested in it. Even before the First World War Ramsay MacDonald dissented from almost all his socialist contemporaries on the Continent in rejecting proportional representation as leading to ‘academic and dogmatic politics’ and as a hindrance to ‘an expression of the public will’. Harold Laski’s ...”

“... passed to the collective ownership and pleasure of the Politburo, more recently to become a high-class sanatorium. In one of the outbuildings, a billboard spells out the stern order of Soviet collective leisure: the times at which to present oneself for dinner, to vacate one’s room, to set off for the beach. Today, it is the headquarters of the Georgian ...”

“... self-pity, any rhetorical elaboration). As a pitilessly unsensational chronicle of what a working-class childhood could be in the England of the 1920s, it is irreplaceable. But is it in any real sense poetry? And from where I stand I have to judge that it isn’t, because all its devices of language are quite plainly instrumental: they serve, and they ...”

“... Walker’s book on Garbo: they depend far less upon books of film history than upon first-class and first-hand research. Instead of a furtive glance at Terry Ramsaye’s A Million and One Nights, everyone’s favourite source book, these authors have tracked down studio files, personal letters and unpublished scenarios. And all of them accept their ...”

“... analysis, rather than a centrifugal one that might splatter their content onto the wider world of class, gender or ethnic particularism. It helps that the gamer’s proxy is always on a quest – for money, gold, any token that may have valuta if not intrinsic value. The numbers it’s necessary to lay waste to en route to these trinkets inflate according to ...”

“... sector to supplement their incomes, but the rewards are disappointing. A veteran of the Iran-Iraq War who drove me into town one evening described the situation in his village: ‘My mother is fine because she is stingy and things are still cheap there, but what do I get by moving to the city? I fought at the front for six years, but now there are no houses ...”

“... fiction: end-time resource wars on a dying planet. The Uninhabitable Earth is an example of the class of writing the eco-philosopher Timothy Morton has described as ‘ecological information data dump’: quantities of frightening and confusing information, mostly out of date by the time of publication, ‘shaking your lapels while yelling disturbing ...”

“... or time’. He finds it strangely bracing to eat in a restaurant built over a Civil War mass grave, ‘as if the dead boys dancing with death had built it just for him 135 years later in a flush Vicksburg, very wide and rolling’. He hates nature, ‘wishing more of it was a rug and smelled like new cars’. Most of all, he’s profoundly ...”

“... but fewer standards. And in a bleaker world, an altered Britain seemed to count for less. Post-war visions of global unity faded; the Commonwealth was no power base. Dwarfed by the super-powers, impoverished, deeply afraid of the bomb, the country seemed less and less capable of taking care of itself. No wonder that some people sought refuge – in ...”

“... sense of foreboding as that of, say, some prescient European at the outset of the Hundred Years War. For four years, Lamb was the Los Angeles Times Africa correspondent. He visited all the countries he writes about and talked with many heads of state. His nationality allows him a certain objectivity about the various post-colonial legacies he ...”

“... male gazers. In his Introduction, Kureishi writes that the intersection of pop ‘with issues of class, race and particularly gender has been at the centre of post-war culture’. But The Faber Book of Pop only seems interested in gender insofar as the blurring of traditional distinctions which pop has encouraged has ...”