“... equal measure. Said’s critical perspective gave both Europeans and non-Europeans a shrewder and more unillusioned sense of the subterranean ways in which power operated through the cultures of empire, and is now so familiar that it’s easily taken for granted. This would be foolish – Eurocentrism is alive and well, and takes new and unexpected forms in ...”

“... invisible companion, helping him to change trains at ‘Milano Centrale’ (‘faster by far and more splendid than Euston or Paddington’), giving him a cheery wave, and then, on the final stages of the journey, ‘watching the pink almond blossom’ as the train speeds south to Naples beside the deep blue sea. Cambridge, when Raymond goes up as an ...”

“... and of the headmastership of James Prince Lee, a future bishop of Manchester and a disciple of Thomas Arnold, whose educational ideals – the strenuous pursuit of knowledge and the cultivation of elevated tone and Christian character – Edward was to perpetuate in his own career. When he was still a student at Cambridge in 1850 his mother and eldest ...”

“... the conviction of Jonathan King for offences against young men dating back twenty-five years and more. While it features some of the police involved, it manages not to ask the pertinent question: if these 15-year-old boys had been 15-year-old girls and romping round in Rolls-Royces even more famous than those of Jonathan ...”

“... people’s experience of the legal system to the way people washed their sheets, and is a far more exciting book than either the title or the rather dull cover would suggest. For a short period, the mystery of these letters became a national news story that generated four separate trials and, as Hilliard writes, ‘demanded ...”

“... near mythic status. By every metric, the miners’ strike was the bigger dispute. It involved more men, lasted much longer and induced state intervention so vicious that certain scenes are embedded in the national consciousness: the Battle of Orgreave, where thousands of police, led by mounted officers, repeatedly charged picketers, took place in June ...”

“... of resistance to his behaviour, since everyone looked as if they were having such a good time. More institutions and public figures were to follow – from news anchors and comedians to MPs, publishers, schoolteachers and Benedictine monks – but they had less screen potential. I couldn’t help feeling that the actresses were once again being asked to ...”

“... or no danger to the country. If asked, in fact, they would probably agree with the philosopher Thomas Nagel, who has said that you cannot trust a person who never lies about sex. The case against Clinton was also doomed by pervasive hypocrisy. The media that thrives on sex and violence postured shamelessly as Clinton’s moral judge. Some ...”

“... it.’ The objection was overcome by the offer of £2 above the box-office take – more, it has been estimated, than the normal yield of a full house. The play was duly performed. What was the play? Five descriptions of it survive from the Government’s interrogations, prosecutions and apologias in the wake of the rising. Though they are all ...”

“... like to feel the earth tremble and see the roof and walls of your home or school fall towards you? More to the point, in terms of survival: what happens next? It depends. Not just on the severity of the injury, but on who and where you are. Death in childbirth, once the leading killer of young women across the world, is now registered almost exclusively among ...”

“... order is, and what a potential threat to order he is’; in the later work he felt able to be much more ‘ragged edged’, less subject to a punitive regime of verbal discipline. ‘No upright poem in its uptight English can seem to me quite free from limescale under the rim,’ he says here, embracing a less house-proud muse. The voice is still full of the ...”

“... who heard it from Clough himself. In his two autobiographies, Architect Errant (1971) and the even more errant Around the World in Ninety Years (1978), there are different versions, although in both, he denies that the incident ever occurred. Because of this ‘improving’, embroidering habit, some effort is required to perceive his earlier two careers as ...”

“... Intentions are in one way more satisfying than works. They can grow and change without limit, and, lacking the certainty of a completed thing, will never entirely disappoint. James Agee had a fortunate career on the face of it, as a New York freelance for almost two decades and then as a screenwriter. One of the large talents of American writing in the 1940s, Agee was a Southerner, from Knoxville, Tennessee, who came North, stayed and prospered ...”

“... had never much liked Mosley, consoled herself with the thought that ‘she had gone to suffer no more at Tom’s hands.’ (Mosley was always known as ‘Tom’ just as Cynthia was known as ‘Cimmie’.) Mosley himself, in his autobiography, described his marriage to Cimmie as ‘an event in my life of outstanding happiness’ – which leaves open the ...”

“... of staged resignations, is now a patchwork of very young MPs and very old ones, many of them doing more than one job. After 29 years in Parliament the 81-year-old Paul Flynn has made his front bench debut as both shadow leader of the house and shadow Welsh secretary. Corbyn and his shadow chancellor, John McDonnell, have also been abandoned by several of the ...”