“... economy of evangelical Christianity. Life was centrally planned: all negotiations had to pass by Jesus’s desk. Language was religiously inflated. When my bedroom was untidy my parents told me that this was ‘poor stewardship’, because it was not right to be careless with God’s things. Poor behaviour was ...”

“... mustered and jostling for position. And the statement itself, all too obviously scrabbled together by some sleep-deprived spad, failing to match the historic significance of the occasion – an election lost or won, a leader toppled or triumphant. How strange that the queen’s first minister had nowhere to speak to the nation from except a draughty stretch of ...”

“... their abrasive life force intact inside a subtly codified front of tidy, polite charm. There would be none of the neutering effected by Colonel Tom Parker on Elvis. The Beatles’ class, accent and sex appeal weren’t glossed away, but finessed for a world beyond the raucous, claustrophobic clubs they were used to. This may ...”

“... of reason and enlightenment. The longing of those with intellectual and radical inclinations to be governed by someone like them can, of course, encourage the investment of unrealistic hopes in potential candidates and the chosen champion can become the target of unreasonable blame. The second, sometimes contingently ...”

“... one was found’). Police investigators will take statements and collect the body, but there will be nothing else: no follow-up, no investigative report, no arrest, no trial, not even a rudimentary explanation of why unknown persons saw fit to immerse José Gallegos’s head in acid. In subsequent issues of PM, his photo will ...”

“... Fredric Jameson’s pre-eminence, over the last generation, among critics writing in English would be hard to dispute. Part of the tribute has been exacted by his majestic style, one distinctive feature of which is the way that the convoy of long sentences freighted and balanced with subordinate clauses will dock here and there to unload a pithy slogan ...”

“... it becomes more and more difficult to hold on to a feeling which has become so instinctive as to be almost consoling: a contemptuous suspicion of the Burmese government, and a refusal to believe anything it claims, proposes or promises. A year ago, Burma’s new president, a former general called Thein Sein, could not have lured any respectable politician to ...”

“... for the great outdoors.’ The twins were in the studio to work on a film called Freaks, made by Tod Browning, who had just directed Dracula with Bela Lugosi. In their 1995 book Dark Carnival: The Secret World of Tod Browning, David Skal and Elias Savada recount the casting process for Freaks: In a Montreal ...”

“... because he was playing with toys, and not because he was a manic depressive, as Arthur proved to be. Nicer to be invited to join a conspiracy than to discover only after his death that your father had treasured your childish scribblings, that he’d added ‘tender little inscriptions and dates’, although he’d never ...”

“... When pushed​ for answers by journalists – about his personal prospects, say, or his relationship with his MPs – Jeremy Corbyn has a special knack for finding his way back to what he really wants to talk about: inequality, injustice, the need for the Labour Party to become a ‘social movement’. This is a common enough tactic for politicians battling to stay on message, but in Corbyn’s case it reflects an abiding set of concerns to which he returns repeatedly ...”

“... The commune​ of Gurs in the foothills of the Pyrenees is famous for its internment camp, built by the French to house fugitives from Spain after the Republic fell to Franco in 1939. A succession of internees went through the camp before it closed on New Year’s Eve 1945. With the Spanish Republicans came International Brigade volunteers who couldn’t get home – Germans, Austrians, Poles ...”

“... For David Edmonds​ , and for many other philosophers, Derek Parfit, who died in 2017, was one of the greatest moral thinkers of the past century, perhaps even since John Stuart Mill. Edmonds rightly believes that if Parfit’s ideas about personal identity, rationality and equality were absorbed into our moral and political thinking, they would radically alter our beliefs about punishment, the distribution of social resources, our relationship to future generations, and more ...”

“... money from A to B. There are times when money in place A, a saver’s bank account, say, would be usefully deployed in place B, a business needing cash to expand, or an individual wanting a mortgage to be able to buy somewhere to live. It’s easy to extrapolate from this that finance is mainly about supplying money to ...”

“... The invitation​ said ‘black dress for Ladies’. ‘You’re not allowed to be whiter than him,’ my husband, Jason, instructs. ‘He has to be the whitest. And you cannot wear a hat because that is his thing.’We are discussing the pope, who has woken one morning, at the age of 86, with a sudden craving to meet artists ...”

“... cover the rise of Benn: not in the Government itself, where it is clear he was marginalised both by Callaghan and his own actions, but in the wider Labour movement. He calls Part Six of the book (May 1979-May 1980) ‘Beginning Again’, and it was on the strength of that new beginning, and of the ‘youngsters’ (of whom more later), that he was to prepare ...”