“... its massive steel doors wide open and its landing ramp fully extended beyond the bow. Major Bill Kerr, commander of 265 Battery and my father’s friend, stood on the lip of the ramp. When he felt the ship’s stern shudder as it scraped the bottom, he stepped forward into what he thought would be ankle-deep water but turned out to come up to his ...”

“... be a way of masking the failings of our political systems, from which far-right populism emerged. Bill Clinton’s former secretary of state Madeleine Albright bemoaned the implications of a Trump presidency for American global leadership in Fascism: A Warning (2018), one of a glut of such books that followed the populist election upsets of 2016, without ...”

“... known as redlining – that had especially pernicious effects in Northern cities. The GI Bill was locally administered, which gave racist petty bureaucrats every opportunity to discriminate.It would be easier to come to terms with the past if Americans could contrive to label one particular period or decision as the paradigmatic crime of a criminal ...”

“... the Atlantic Station in Atlanta and the Luxor Hotel and Casino in Las Vegas, where it shares a bill with the comedian Carrot Top and Menopause: The Musical. ‘Titanic’: The Experience is the bigger show; among other treats, it ‘immerses visitors in the hundred-year story as never experienced before’ – an unhappy metaphor perhaps – by allowing ...”

“... to mind an image drawn from another sport: Lucy endlessly lining up the football for Charlie Brown to kick, only to pull it away at the last moment and send him flying. Obama did the opposite of that. He went out of his way to ensure the ball was where it needed to be. All she had to do was swing. And she whiffed. The tug-of-war between the two sides of ...”

“... through Facebook accounts, until a second message told me he had swapped his father’s surname, Brown, for his mother’s, Lindsay. I typed in ‘William Lindsay’ and there he was: a boy in a EA7 bomber jacket with headphones round his neck, flaming hair and a lopsided smile.When I got back to Glasgow, I learned why my contact had risked his job to give ...”

“... has taken the opportunity to talk openly about the worrying thoughts in our heads as we drain the brown fluid from the meat in a polystyrene punnet. Obesity, heart disease, animal welfare, greenhouse gases, the nagging intimation that we can’t go on as we have without parts of the food chain shearing away: Defra grasps that our misgivings, like our ...”

“... that councils will face £9.9 billion of unfunded costs by 2019-20. The Housing and Planning Bill has revived ‘Right to Buy’, forcing councils once again to sell off their (all too few) properties at a discount, without receiving compensation or additional funding to build replacements. This will only exacerbate the housing crisis: Shelter estimates ...”

“... years after he became leader, the Conservatives received a series of damaging leaks about Gordon Brown’s government which could only have come from a civil servant. In November 2008, police raided the parliamentary office of Damian Green, a Tory MP and a member of the Home Affairs Select Committee, in connection with the leaks, and arrested him on ...”

“... images, after all, wielded the ultimate strategic advantage in this sceptical age: the ability to bill themselves as unfiltered, unadulterated, unprocessed and unblinking – leftover artefacts of a technical process rather than calculated pieces of propaganda. Instead of staking a position in an adversarial argument, they presented themselves as the eye’s ...”

“... many of them privatised – are what I see. On the far side of Roman Road are the barracks-style brown brick walkways of the Greenways estate, built in the 1950s, solid and unremarkable, renovated not long ago, providing homes for hundreds; beyond them, its crown poking up beyond the Greenways roof, is Denys Lasdun’s listed Sulkin House, built on the site ...”

“... on the brink of theirs? I didn’t cry when Philip died either. I’d seen him shrivel into a brown husk, the taut dry skin stretched over his skeleton like a mummified body excavated from some desert tomb. I’d seen him in his wheelchair with an oxygen mask clamped to his face, his eyes rotating wildly. I went to the loo and stared at my face and felt ...”

“... billets, reserve trenches and other staging-areas behind the lines. ‘This in fact,’ Malcolm Brown writes in Tommy Goes to War, ‘was the classic progress “up the line”: train to the railhead, after which the Tommy had to fall back on the standard means of troop-transportation in the First World War – his own feet.’ All the famous soldier-songs ...”

“... be something of an illusion, or even his Achilles’ heel. Despite the passage of the healthcare bill, it remains to be seen whether rhetoric can fully triumph over the crushing anomie of state bureaucracy and the realities of political power. And that is not to speak of the lethal counter-enthusiasm, the ugly, race-tinted hatreds also provoked by the ...”

“... doubtless played a part, but it would have been better for honesty and good sense to withhold a bill of health that cleared the book and its author at a stroke. We don’t defend the right to publish offensive words because we think the author well-meaning. The point is that we distrust the ambition of those who would take away the right more than we ...”