“... that it is not entirely proof against theoretical objections’; and, as Freud’s follower Ernest Jones wrote, ‘no biological observation can be found to support the idea of a death instinct, which contradicts all biological principles.’ The death instinct, I want to suggest, was Freud’s way of broaching the part of the self that wants, at its most ...”

“... language. The colours were too bright perhaps.7 March. Read and enjoy Edgelands by Paul Farley and Michael Symmons Roberts about the lure of in-between places and the edges of cities and other communities. I feel I was on to this years ago in my play The Old Country, when Hilary, a spy in the Foreign Office, describes the venues where he met his Soviet ...”

“... of experienced EPA staffers and scientists,’ Rebecca Leber reported early this year in Mother Jones, ‘while putting old friends and industry reps in charge of key environmental decisions.’ The military and charter flights he booked for himself, his $2 million security detail, his payment of $120,000 to an opposition research outfit to spy on hostile ...”

“... of Corfu. There are several different versions of Mosley’s political career. Fellow politicians, Michael Foot and Richard Crossman among them, took the view that, like themselves, he was interested in power but that, unlike them, unlike Foot and Crossman at any rate, he was too impatient to wait his turn. For Skidelsky, though there are signs that he may now ...”

“... lined up to replace him included Jim Callaghan, Roy Jenkins, Tony Benn, Anthony Crosland, Michael Foot and Denis Healey. It was, by any historical standards, an impressive cast list. The Parliamentary Labour Party made the right choice in plumping for Callaghan over the initial favourite, Healey, and the surprise early front-runner, Foot. Of all the ...”

“... Tory journalists who campaigned against the Good Friday Agreement, including his cabinet colleague Michael Gove.Northern Irish politics are more turbulent than at any time since the Good Friday Agreement was signed. Sinn Féin and the Democratic Unionist Party came close to an agreement for the restoration of power-sharing at the start of 2018, but the DUP ...”

“... can’t kill them all. When I kill one, I create three.’ I heard that Congressman Walter Jones, Republican from North Carolina and the man who renamed French fries ‘freedom fries’, was now calling for the withdrawal of US troops. I heard him say: ‘The American people are getting to a point here: how much more can we take?’ I heard Congressman ...”

“... the argument of The Death and Life of Great American Cities. Kanigel notes that a single block of Jones Street, the location of her first Manhattan flat, contained 1840s houses and 1920s apartments, a toy factory, a French laundry, an ice dealer’s cellar, a barber’s shop and three speakeasies – all unaffected by zoning regulations. At the time she was ...”

“... are silenced or sidelined: for example, the sceptical advice on WMD proffered by Dr Brian Jones, head of the nuclear, biological, chemical, technical intelligence branch of the Defence Intelligence Staff, and totally ignored.During​ the Brexit negotiations, Johnson didn’t have a problem with telling outright lies. Starting in Parliament on 22 ...”

“... who have complained. Excuse me, but it is surely uneducated and impressionable girls like Paula Jones – vulnerable to predatory superiors and working on short-term contracts – for whose protection the sexual harassment laws were specifically designed. As ever, it is the class element in this dismal narrative that bears watching.On Whitewater, it has ...”

“... dismissive though faintly technical-sounding ‘pervert’ is pervasive. ‘PC Burton said he knew Jones as a convicted pervert,’ we read in an early newspaper report – the word trenchant but fastidious, declining to engage in the niceties of just what he was convicted of. The distaste it conveys is summed up by the awful Winterton when he says: ‘I ...”

“... agreed to behave as if the fictions of J.G. Ballard were planning documents, the painter Gavin Jones, working covertly and alone, excavated a wartime bunker hidden beneath a grassy mound outside a block of council flats in Bow. He disguised the entrance with an upturned boat, ran out electrical cables and made himself a set of dank studios; he offered one ...”

“... to get back in. A nightmare, my own: to be locked in a dark, stuffy nursery cupboard with Boris, Michael, Nigel and their pals. England will become a place the young want to get out of, in search of fresh air and light.James ButlerThere is​ now a knot at the centre of British politics. If politicians push for inclusion in the European Economic Area, in the ...”

“... talked up withdrawal from Europe long before Ukip appeared on the scene. In the early 1980s, in Michael Foot’s Labour Party, quitting the EEC was policy. When Neil Kinnock took over, Labour embraced Europe, but Mitchell didn’t. His banishment to the back benches as the epitome of old Labour – a socialist, an internationalist and localist rather than ...”

“... with a publisher with authors like James, Strindberg, Ford and Belloc historically on its list. As Michael Barber, an earlier biographer of Powell, without access to his archives, remarked, it was a period where a little privilege went a long way. There is no reason to doubt that at least in his first year in the capital, Powell felt at sea in London, of ...”