“... The ludicrous Mr Kenneth Baker blames the Church, and in particular the Bishop of Liverpool, David Sheppard, probably because he’s the only socialist in sight.22 February. A large crowd gathers outside Bootle Magistrates Court, to jeer as the vans carrying the two ten-year-olds accused of the toddler’s murder are driven away. One man eludes the ...”

“... à la Mallarmé, and the proliferation, the infinite extension of form à la Wagner and the novel, may coincide and the coincidence result in compositions of original beauty. But the two aesthetics are also very different, and a possible deconstruction of some of Boulez’s notions might begin here. For isn’t it really one thing to make a composition ...”

“... Guided at times by Gramsci’s concept of cultural hegemony, Eugene Genovese, Eric Foner and David Brion Davis conceived slavery as a mode of organising labour, as well as a system of racial domination. This led to the recognition that advocates of ‘free labour’ had economic as well as humanitarian reasons for opposing slavery, and that the Northern ...”

“... the English ‘occluded’ Scotland because they regarded it as integral to the British project may be more attractive than historical because it draws on unionist assumptions she also wants us to resist. Most historians would say that Scotland was ignored as long as it was no threat to wealthier, populous England. Although Elizabeth enabled a series of ...”

“... improving organisational capacity of the SNP during the 1960s; the discovery of North Sea oil; or David McCrone and Steven Kendrick’s elegant theory, which emphasises the role of television in a distinctly Scottish news media, producing a ‘Scottish frame of reference’ for contentious state planning decisions that could be exploited by the SNP.The story ...”

“... and Bloom’s faltering response to the prejudice he encounters genuinely heroic. Bloom may lack the ancient military virtues, but he possesses the secular qualities of ‘prudence, intelligence, sensitivity and good will’. And he is kind to animals.– Milk for the pussens, he said.– Mrkgnao! the cat cried.They call them stupid. They understand ...”

“... New political ideas and movements have never arisen from the mass media, although the media may have been important in spreading knowledge about these developments. At its best, the press has been able to influence opinion, but it has never enjoyed the power to determine the course of events, or the way people think. Nonetheless, one of the popular ...”

“... succession there once again predominated the cares of actually existing immortality.’ One may well find this second section episodic, and something of an indulgence on Grass’s part, his own licence to comment on a variety of topical events, from television culture to the assassination of the Treuhand chief Rohwedder: repetitive as well, since we ...”

“... racial preoccupations. But no one has yet given Bunche the kind of magisterial treatment David Levering Lewis gave Du Bois. In his new book, Kal Raustiala, who concentrates on Bunche’s work at the UN, admits that he hasn’t done it either. (Writing this essay, I have drawn on all three biographies and on Henry’s edition of Bunche’s ...”

“... retrospectively alter the GDP estimate. The number goes on changing for months, indeed years. It may well be that the position is worse than it looks. It may be that it’s better: unemployment fell by 7000 in December, beating expectations, so perhaps the economy is in better nick than 0.1 per cent growth suggests. On the ...”

“... reputation rather than the book certainly tends to protect authors, if only in the short term, and may in fact benefit St Aubyn in the case of Lost for Words. Satire is supposed to bite the hand that feeds it, but for a novelist (particularly one who hasn’t been short of critical praise) to savage the world of reviewers can seem a bite too far. One character ...”

“... his personal jeweller for two hundred wrist watches that flashed both cross of Jesus and star of David. Such personal touches were far more Elvis than any of the books that had been recommended to him. Soon life would again be games with lascivious starlets and golden guns and awesome dune buggies. Soon he would be home again and primed for every day’s ...”

“... the implications of nuclear warfare. It is only among the non-nuclear minor powers that war may appeal as a rational way of obtaining one’s ends. On the other hand, his prose style is dialectical and reflects the clash of thesis and antithesis in human affairs: as with Oakeshott’s writings, the meaning is not always on the surface. Few in his field ...”

“... too late. She landed upside down in front of an excited crowd of twenty thousand’ – not, we may assume, looking quite unruffled. West, who wrote a lot of the script for Every Day’s a Holiday and took credit for all of it, bowed in the end to the censors, as a result of which the film was not funny and it flopped. Clothes, for those who could afford to ...”