“... threatened. ‘Progress’ and ‘development’ have been among its guiding concepts (in 2005, Tony Blair was able to win a general election with the vacuous campaign slogan ‘Forward not back’). In rejecting knowledge of the future, Brexitists are saying no to such a politics and to the assumptions about social change on which it rests. Theirs is an ...”

“... as much as it does Le Pen. For the left, Macron isn’t just a French version of Bill Clinton or Tony Blair – a supposedly progressive politician who extols the free market and has sold out to big business. He also conjures up memories of Louis-Napoléon Bonaparte, who launched his 1851 coup by papering Paris with posters announcing: ‘I have dissolved ...”

“... Brandt changed the way the English look at the English. He was cosmopolitan. His disciple, Tony Ray-Jones, wasn’t. He allowed his once provincial eye to be led by Brandt. Ray-Jones may have shared his subjects with Donald McGill or Ken Russell but his compositions of simultaneous actions by competing players are stolen from a different world.They are ...”

“... I heard that the family of an American soldier killed in Iraq receives $12,000. I heard that the White House had deleted the chapter on Iraq from the annual Economic Report of the President, on the grounds that it did not conform with an otherwise cheerful tone. Within a week in January I heard Condoleezza Rice say there were 120,000 Iraqi troops trained to ...”

“... in the afternoon Julian turned up with his ragged clothes torn to tatters, which flapped about his white thighs. He put on some clothes of mine and lay panting and sighing after the luxurious enjoyment of so much exercise.’His openness wasn’t typical of the rest of his family either. Julian’s younger sister, Angelica, wrote bitterly in her memoir ...”

“... There’s Pavey, a 66-year-old retired electrician in a Manchester United hooded top, a wispy white pageboy haircut and dark glasses, standing by a wall on the bank of the River Avon. He’s holding his right hand horizontally in the air, about thirty centimetres above the top of the wall, which comes up to his waist. The olive-coloured Avon ripples ...”

“... publicity ‘toxic’ and mistrusted the incestuousness of New York literary circles: ‘great white sharks fighting over a bathtub, you know?’ He had other reasons for wanting to stay out west. A former ‘near great’ junior tennis player and adolescent ‘math-wienie’ – in the words of an essay written for Harper’s in 1991 – he loved the ...”

“... days often included professional and business men, but later came to be drawn primarily from the white-collar and lower middle class. The Brigade gave them an unrivalled opportunity for inculcating their highly-prized virtues of personal discipline and self-improvement, and for offering the urban teenage boy something better than a life of street-corner ...”

“... was nothing like the one he tarted up for his memoirs. Brussel’s real advice was to search White Plains, New York for an egomaniacal German high-school graduate in his forties with a facial scar; an expert in bomb-making; a man who had ‘a classic textbook case of paranoia’, rather than a genuine beef. Whoops. The evidence which led to the capture ...”

“... The latter danger has been greatly increased by the attacks. The terrorists have raised to white heat certain smouldering tendencies among the American Right, while simultaneously – as is usually the case at the start of wars – pushing American politics and most of its population in a sharply rightward direction; all of which has taken place under ...”

“... would give him a superficial affinity to that line of elected reps, from Winston Churchill to Tony Benn, for whom, at times, eloquence and historical self-consciousness have seemed ends in themselves. Yet there is another less exalted political figure the mayor recalls: Alastair Campbell. A journalist like Johnson, Campbell tried to shorten the old PR ...”

“... judge, Linda Dobbs QC, has just been appointed), the legal profession continues to be dominated by white men, frustrating efforts to diversify the bench. The proposal to change lawyers’ career patterns so as, for example, to allow them to combine part-time judicial sitting with child care, is valuable but nowhere near sufficient. One day government is going ...”

“... from an Iranian flag descended between them. Mahmoud, the leader of the set, wore a black and white checked scarf; his beard was thick but neatly trimmed; he was 18 years old. I knew Mahmoud slightly and was keen to speak to him. ‘Islam is the complete solution to our problems,’ Mahmoud said, explaining that our brothers in Afghanistan and Palestine ...”

“... gimmickry. To me, the decisive moment in his appearance outside a church across the road from the White House, not quite knowing which way up to hold a Bible, was the exposure of the gimmick as an object no longer able to perform its designated narrative or symbolic function. ‘Is that your Bible?’ a reporter asked Trump. ‘It’s a Bible.’ Ngai could ...”

“... Adani’s use of offshore shell companies; and his supporters took to the airwaves to allege that white people just couldn’t bear to see India make progress.In the weeks since then, Adani’s spectacular fall has continued: among other reverses, he had to cancel the $2.5 billion share sale, and no longer sits near the top of the list of the world’s ...”