“... One important advantage of the Trade Unions running their own papers is that they might be able to foster a more co-operative attitude towards the introduction of modern print technology. We are at the dawn of a new technological age: what Anthony Smith describes as ‘the third revolution in communication’ – the others were the invention of writing and of ...”

“... This truth to the ideals of a handcrafted world, and the social relations which it would foster, simplified – or blinkered – his view of things; he could believe in solutions where a more worldly commentator would see no hope. Called in to advise on the planning of Jerusalem at the time of the Balfour Declaration, he encouraged Chipping ...”

“... and by the sense of shared grievances that the West’s ‘war on terror’ was likely to foster among Muslims. The concept of ‘leaderless jihad’, now much in vogue among so-called terrorism experts, is to a great extent al-Suri’s invention. Considering his belief in leaderless jihad, it’s remarkable that al-Suri continued to have the ear of ...”

“... songwriting? And their strikingly discrete individual talents? And the way their music helped foster a revolution in sexual mores, politics and drug consumption? Schütte thinks they may be even more important than that. ‘Could, for example, techno have emerged from inner-city areas of Detroit without them?’ The link can’t be denied, but it’s ...”

“... So come delight in the city again, swap stories, argue politics, see a show, have a drink. Hal Foster New York If I had been there and seen it up close in New York or Washington, I, too, might cry out for revenge. But I have been there at other times: in Libya, when American warplanes punished people who were asleep and unarmed; in Iraq, when America sent ...”

“... of their own heads. It afflicts English studies as it does most others, and had a recent airing in John Carey’s inaugural lecture at Oxford which proposed that scholars handle texts whereas critics only vandalise them by reading them. This double and triple illusion usefully affords occasion for simple restatements: that, for instance, to read at all is in ...”

“... nature’s experiments, not as the culmination of nature’s design, echoes Berlin’s use of John Stuart Mill’s phrase ‘experiments in living’. (It also, of course, echoes Jefferson’s and Dewey’s use of the term ‘experiment’ to describe American democracy.) Like Berlin, I have been criticising the Platonic-Kantian attempt to do what Berlin ...”

“... of sporting successes, he said the explanation was simple. Money: the lottery money introduced by John Major in 1994. But the national lottery wasn’t the ECB’s only source of money. Sky began broadcasting cricket in 1990, but in 2006, on the back of England’s Ashes success, it acquired exclusive rights to all of England’s home matches. Since ...”

“... public figures who fell from grace: Richard Nixon, his former special counsel Charles Colson, and John Newton, the Anglican hymn-writer who once captained slave ships. Nazarbayev’s life story doesn’t have this trajectory. It is 19 years since he became his republic’s leader and his rise has not yet crested. You could say that by accepting the Kazakh ...”

“... Bailey, the well-regarded biographer of Charles Jackson (The Lost Weekend), Richard Yates and John Cheever, three alcohol-plagued novelists whose torments kept late hours. As it happened Atlas would outlive Roth only by a year, dying in September 2019 from complications of a lung condition. At the close of Remembering Roth, he bids sad adieu to Philip ...”

“... viewed with dismay the lack of restraint and caution in O’Donovan Rossa’s violent rhetoric. John Devoy, one of the leaders of Clan na Gael, the main Irish nationalist organisation in America, believed, as Kenna writes, that O’Donovan Rossa ‘had given the British ample warning of his plans through a desire for notoriety and theatricality, thus ...”

“... the Sierra Madre, and a friendly profile of its director in Life, led to an invitation to work for John Huston. He wrote an adaptation of Stephen Crane’s story ‘The Blue Hotel’, which Huston did not use but liked enough to give him another project, The African Queen. Later Agee collaborated with Charles Laughton on the screenplay of Davis Grubb’s ...”

“... during the period of composition the world does nothing but give you gifts.They love David Foster Wallace here, and I have read no one but him for months. His books are everywhere in tall voluble stacks – a writer is always everywhere when you are working on them. I feel partially disrobed when I see his name. At my sickest, I had begun asking ...”

“... ageing parents, developing early what we now believe to be a spinal tuberculosis contracted from a foster-nurse, and further weakened by a bad accident in infancy, a trampling by a vagrant cow, Pope was a delicate – though decidedly beautiful – child, and an incapacitated adult, in middle life crippled and often in pain). Johnson tells how, all his ...”

“... their equivalent in the 2005 reissue of Our Island Story by the right-wing think-tank Civitas. John Clare, the education editor of the Daily Telegraph, appealed to his readers for donations to support this project. ‘They responded by sending in an astonishing £25,000.’ There were messages of endorsement from Lady Antonia Fraser and the feisty ...”