“... to the flexibilities of our belief in them. But novelists do write to a present, and though there may be nothing of fishwives or moneylenders or hip hop in their pages, the language, the texture, the pattern, the ‘aesthetics’, have everything to do with the social pressure under which the book was written and under which it was initially read. Stendhal is ...”

“... a shortcoming emphasised by Girvin. Exasperated, the US representative in Dublin, David Gray, complained that ‘this running a government on hatred for another country is a very dangerous thing and is bound to land him [de Valera] on the scrap heap eventually.’ He couldn’t have been more wrong. ‘Emergency’ was also a technical ...”

“... At another point, Campbell notes that ‘he had clearly been chatting to his maker again.’ That may be the key to Blair’s metamorphosis from a politician who prided himself on his sensitivity to public opinion, to one who prided himself on his ability to ignore it. The full extent of the disaster in Iraq is not present in these pages, but it looms over ...”

“... rescinded blacks’ right to vote almost entirely. Nathans notes these events, but not how they may have affected life on the Cameron land, or what strategies black purchasers deployed to hold onto their farms. It remains unclear how much the closing off of political participation influenced the decision to move to the North. Nathans notes that an oral ...”

“... imperatives became acute.’ And each claimed that while the development of the market economy may have appeared natural and inevitable, it was in fact contingent on political circumstances. Early on Rogan identifies a crucial parallel: Tawney, Polanyi and Thompson all experienced an epiphany when they moved out of their comfortable intellectual milieux ...”

“... and its immobilisation in infrastructure – a ‘spatial fix’, in the words of the geographer David Harvey – is one progenitor of Xi’s grand initiative. China’s treatment by the US is another.In October 2011, Obama’s then secretary of state, Hillary Clinton, announced the birth of ‘America’s Pacific Century’ in an article for Foreign ...”

“... feelings in their faces.’ Hitchcock’s films are informed by the sense that pleasant faces may conceal murderous feelings. Respectable appearances repeatedly dissolve into extraordinary menace. Benign professors whip out guns, as do nuns and housekeepers. Being afraid that friendly looks might fade to an ominous black stare isn’t, of course, an ...”

“... comics and the like could be made to serve some of the goals set for high art from Rembrandt and David to Rothko and Barnett Newman: not only pictorial unity and dramatic focus, but also ‘significant form’ (as Roger Fry and Clive Bell urged) and ‘the integrity of the picture plane’ (the vaunted ‘flatness’ demanded of Modernist painting by Clement ...”

“... of Anglo-British governance remains that all official information is secret but that officialdom may choose to bestow access to parts of it on people who are not otherwise entitled to know it. For the last few centuries this has principally meant the press and the media, and the state has always been aware that such access can be sold in return for political ...”

“... even mention the word ‘Conservative’. This had worked in 1918, when a coalition led by David Lloyd George, ‘the man who won the war’, and including the Tories, secured an electoral landslide.Not this time. Churchill rendered Attlee a great service with his disgraceful broadcast warning that a Labour government wouldn’t allow free expression ...”

“... back is as dry as the Mojave, ready. Cranston’s comedy is to be a half-step ahead of the beat, David Duchovny’s to be a half-step behind. In a moving car this balances, like when you perfectly pace a moving walkway so it appears to be standing still. In their silences they are talking about ambition, acknowledging strengths and weaknesses, they are ...”

“... motive for lethal Kennedy-hatred among disaffected CIA and Mafia types, insofar as the two species may be distinguished. The explanation turns out to be relatively simple, and consistent with the known facts. Kennedy was waiting to hear that Castro had been assassinated in Havana. When he didn’t hear, he calmly betrayed the mercenary force as the laws of ...”

“... illegal in France. At university, she met Philippe Ernaux, got married, and had two boys, Eric and David. She returned to teaching, working for 23 years at the Centre National d’Enseignement par Correspondance, a sort of French Open University. The family moved to Cergy-Pontoise, a new town on the end of the RER A, on the north-west edge of Paris. Her father ...”

“... soldier takes any notice of it, he continues to play his game of darts or draughts or whatever it may be. When, on the other hand, someone tunes into Lord Haw-Haw, the whole room gets up and gathers round the wireless.’ The War Office wrote to Frederick Ogilvie, who had succeeded Reith as the BBC’s director-general, worrying that Joyce’s ...”

“... office on 3 September proved to be, in Hunt’s words, a ‘dry hole’. Some months later, on 3 May 1972, on the orders of Colson, the White House arranged to fly some Cuban-American veterans of the Bay of Pigs to Washington from Miami. They were told that Ellsberg (now released on bail) would be attending an anti-war rally on the steps of the Capitol and ...”