“... of Spark’s life has a certain archetypal appeal, its trajectory being from a lower-middle-class childhood in Edinburgh, ‘half in, half out of the Edinburgh Jewish community’, to fame and fortune in middle life. On the way, there was a failed marriage which led to a barren wartime sojourn in Africa, and a son from whom she was often ...”

“... of Zyklon B to Saddam Hussein. What a Carve Up! ends as Number 11 begins, with Britain wading into war in Iraq. The Winshaws don’t make many appearances in Number 11, but rather like the ghost of David Kelly they haunt its edges. Britain’s depressed condition is shown to be a consequence of policies that they had a hand in – or, more precisely, of an ...”

“... as a matter of grace and not as a matter of necessity … would reverse the result of the Civil War.’ The judgment was hailed by the doyen of public lawyers, Sir William Wade, as the most important decision of our courts for more than two hundred years – that is since Entick v. Carrington. Yet Entick v. Carrington is not mentioned in the House of ...”

“... to discuss the classic example, Tolstoy, and his supposed decline from the panoramic vitality of War and Peace to the ‘aridity of the late short fiction’. Yet to the author himself, JC suggests, the evolution must have seemed very different: ‘Far from declining, he must have felt, he was ridding himself of the shackles that had enslaved him to ...”

“... is 16 years old, of small stature, and has a yellowish complexion and short curly hair.’ With war between Denmark and Britain looming, she suspected he had run off to join the militia. Eleven years later, and more than a thousand miles across the sea, a surveyor carrying out a study of the Icelandic coast for the Danish government was guided through the ...”

“... Global Access initiative (Covax) meant a chance to reassert what, in the aftermath of the Iraq War, had been touted as the EU’s ‘normative power’ on the global stage. The commission president, Ursula von der Leyen, appeared to be the perfect person for the crisis: an experienced administrator and trained doctor, with a master’s degree in public ...”

“... you don’t have a close relationship with, you have to say, hi professor whatever, I’m in your class or I’m interested in this blah blah blah,’ one student says. ‘You have to kind of frame it.’ Several of the students surveyed watch recorded lectures at triple speed – not just to save time, but to help them concentrate. And yet nearly all the ...”

“... Polly, was a colonel’s daughter who managed to lose her unsatisfactory spouse in the Great War, and then set up a shop. Her mother was a professional virgin who accumulated fifty proposals, married two pale men, and then made a fortune writing pulp romances. But Raine did best of all. She married the man who was to become her first earl, Gerald ...”

“... man.’ The news media recently carried the story of a large award of damages made to a working-class family catastrophically overtaken by the negligent diagnosis and treatment of their young daughter. Without legal aid they could not even have contemplated going to the courts for redress. I doubt whether, if contingency fees were permitted, any lawyer ...”

“... rather a let-down – that the day’s news from the newspaper, particularly of the Spanish Civil War, furnished the stuff of most of their conversations. You are also aware by now of the cunning with which Canetti is presenting this impersonal person Dr Sonne. As in a screenplay, he has first been glimpsed behind his paper in the Café Museum, a ...”

“... Labour Secretary of State for Industry, echoes the contrast in his own life between the working-class boy from Hebden Bridge and the glory to which he rose: ‘He spoke of his miner father coughing up his pneumoconiosis in the next bedroom to himself at home and of the 18 constituents who had died when their cage crashed in carnage to the bottom of Markham ...”

“... of officials nominated by the Party apparatus has a definite tendency to turn people into a ruling class, exploiting the rest of the people.’ For one of their own to round on them in these terms was unheard of in the seventy years of Communist Party rule, and would have led to her death under Stalin, or to internal exile under his successors. Zaslavskaya’s ...”

“... 1906. The currency is the rouble, for Poland is part of the Russian empire, recently disturbed by war with Japan and an abortive revolution. But the Russians are still the ruling class, and Max Barabander’s experiences merge naturally into those of Singer in Love and Exile, who used to wander endlessly with his moribund ...”

“... ones), or any other group to which the victim of the syndrome happens to belong (e.g. middle-class homeowners with tax-deductible mortgage interest payments), but in any case fatally destructive of character and self-respect when given to the poor; and 3. the delusion that Adam Smith propounded any such beliefs – i.e. that his ‘invisible ...”

“... is to keep us waiting for the confirmation and the details. Meanwhile Kate sheds her middle-class identity, leaves Sydney, and travels somewhere on that line through and beyond Dubbo to Narromine, Trangie, Nevertire, Mullengudgery and finally Myambagh, where she eats a great deal of white bread and steak, works as a barmaid, and becomes involved with ...”