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“... a Libyan tribe that controlled virtually all trans-Saharan trade. Recent British fieldwork, led by David Mattingly, has demonstrated that this civilisation, in an area where average annual rainfall is less than 10 mm, practised intensive agriculture supported by qanats (locally called foggaras): underground tunnels that tapped an aquifer in the slopes of an ...”

“... that ‘a thin line of settlements along the Jordan would not provide a viable defence … The vital strategic issue was how to give depth to the coastal plain … The answer was to build a [network] of urban, industrial settlements.’ Likud had just won the election and as a result of Israel’s failure to predict the imminence of the 1973 war, the ...”

“... He makes clear that mobs, mafias and global rackets are often performing useful and occasionally vital social functions that no other institution – governments, legal systems, the police, the economy itself – is capable of providing. It’s usually assumed that organised crime is a network of unqualified evil: murderous, recklessly greedy, the enemy of ...”

“... liquid bottle (‘cleans, no added promises’) on a fire. Words rear up and loom enormous – David Cameron, for example, may find this with his plan for ‘thrifty government’ – and fizz and collapse and make a nasty smell. It is, I take it, obvious that one of the many things no one particularly needs at the moment is a book that tells you how to ...”

“... He then turns to Raphael Samuel’s interviews in Stevenage in 1959-60 and John Goldthorpe and David Lockwood’s surveys in Cambridge and Luton in the early 1960s to trace the way migration to the ‘new towns’ and rising prosperity affected those attitudes. Next he mines the questionnaires gathered by researchers working with Richard Brown on Tyneside ...”

“... had two rooms, kitchen and bathroom – what East European biographer could fail to give this vital information?)Antisemitism, largely absent from Bauman’s life since 1939, re-entered it in the early 1950s, as suspicion of Jews mounted in East European and Soviet communist parties. In 1952 a confidential report on Bauman’s army work noted ...”

“... at fringe meetings at Tory conferences where the mood could best be described as hostile – yet David Cameron and even George Osborne appear genuinely committed to the project. They see it as a way of boosting business and of demonstrating their credentials as modernisers. They also believe it will help their electoral prospects in the North. The fate of ...”

“... to pose, the enraged Freud painted over her face and inserted that of his long-time assistant David Dawson. But the baby had not caused offence, so was not painted out, with the result that a naked and strangely breasted Dawson is now seen feeding the child. Freud’s American dealer assumed the picture would be unsellable; it was bought by the first ...”

“... Baldwin died’. Philip Roth has been led to histories of American racism by Coates’s books. David Brooks credits him for advancing an ‘education for white people’ that evidently began after ‘Ferguson, Baltimore, Charleston and the other killings’. Even USA Today thinks that ‘to have such a voice, in such a moment, is a ray of light.’ Coates ...”

“... of that project. What we really mean when we say that austerity has slashed the state – it is a vital distinction, and not made nearly often enough – is that it has wrecked the ability of elected local authorities to provide and administer many of the features and functions of the state as we understand them. Without seeing austerity in these terms, we ...”

“... and sections of Georgian terrace, facilitating the new transport hub that would service the vital axes, south to the City, east to the Olympic Park. ‘In two houses on Dalston Lane,’ Parry-Davies told us, ‘there were squatters. A couple of guys came to the back door and said, “You’d better get out. Now.” Two days later the houses burned ...”

“... God is again shown dove-like on the abyss: His brooding wings the Spirit of God outspread, And vital virtue infused, and vital warmth Throughout the fluid mass, but downward purged The black tartareous cold infernal dregs Adverse to life: then founded, then conglobed Like things to like . . . It is not only the ...”

“... draw well. Mark Rothko has ‘severe limitations as a draughts man’, as does Milton Avery; David Smith is ‘very uneven’, Magritte straightforwardly poor. Hughes’s tendency to argue both sides achieves poignancy in his famous, and well-deserved, attack on Julian Schnabel: ‘in Schnabel,’ he charges, ‘our time of insecure self-congratulation ...”

“... and fiction. Fitzgerald shared with his hero Gatsby an untimely death and barely attended funeral. David Brown’s thorough biography, Paradise Lost, emphasises that Fitzgerald lived with the constant tension between the desire to be a ‘whole man’ and the recognition of its impossibility. His life was full of drama and destruction: reckless spending, high ...”