“... James Whale was born in Dudley, Worcestershire, in 1889, the sixth of seven children in a working-class family. He served in the Great War, and was imprisoned by the Germans. He acted, designed, stage-managed and directed in the theatre in London in the Twenties, but it was all fairly desultory until he took on ...”

“... from Rowland Road and indicates that one should stand up. ‘What do you want to do after 12th class?’ he says. ‘I want to be an artist,’ says Raju. ‘Very beautiful,’ says the President. ‘And you?’ Abdul stands up. ‘I want to be an engineer,’ he says. ‘Whatever character is there,’ says the President, ‘whatever condition, the ...”

“... made phosgene, one of the nastier gases developed and used by the German Army in the First World War. One of my sources claimed that the phosgene stocked in Toulouse could not have had a wholly non-military use (I was never able to verify this rumour). It was stored in a large underground chamber across the river from the factory, and even closer to the city ...”

“... Rivers baby begins to cry. I’d be interested to know whether it was Moore’s implication that class divisions can outweigh the shared bonds of motherhood that led Virginia Woolf to describe Esther Waters as ‘this novel without a heroine’, as if she doubted that servants were a proper subject for serious literary representation. Moore was certainly one ...”

“... Become a junkie’s moll, a psychiatric inmate, a teacher trying to get the attention of a class of adolescents eight times a day, a parent, a writer – all of it, after a short while, is just what you happen to be doing. Habit, arguably, is more powerful than liking or hating your circumstances. You get used to everything in the end. I know only one ...”

“... warns against overdetermining these poems about the ‘rat-coloured igloos of the Northern working class’. If he ‘didn’t get anywhere near to understanding the politics and poetry of the people and houses around me … A reason for this could be that they didn’t have any.’ A large dose of wary detachment, then, has always coexisted in Dunn with the ...”

“... of wealth and poverty unknown in other regions. The free economy of small farmers and a merchant class with a few grandees and many more ambitious shopkeepers produced less dramatic results. American farmers sought a decent ‘competence’ that would sustain both themselves and their children; they produced modest surpluses for the market, but did most of ...”

“... crusade, a Campaign for Real Poverty. The government has stopped short of explicitly declaring war on the poor. But how different would the situation be if it had?Look at things from Pat Quinn’s point of view, for instance. What’s being done to her is happening quite slowly, over a period of months, and is not the work of a gang of thugs breaking down ...”

“... Avenue is more of a jolt It’s over a decade since Mugabe and his guerrillas in effect won the war to liberate Zimbabwe, but its capital’s street names are a bizarre mélange. North of Selous the next avenue is Livingstone; then comes Herbert Chitepo, named after an African leader martyred in the struggle. To the south, Baker and Speke intrude between ...”

“... embezzling $250,000 from funds meant for the refugees who fled from Abkhazia after its secession war in 1993 (another $600,000 was intercepted before he could pay it into his account). David Mirtskhulava, the former minister of energy, had a mild heart attack when he was charged with pocketing $6 million on its way to pay Georgia’s bill for electricity ...”

“... not as a cheerfully rising graph – increasing prosperity in the South, and the gradual end of war in the North – but as what he calls ‘a series of interconnected crises’, and interconnected liberations. He traces a number of overlapping movements: some, like the Celtic Tiger, seemed to happen incredibly quickly; others, like the peace process in the ...”

“... us, for instance, that Gray was already 41 when he completed his first novel. From his working-class parents – especially his father – he inherited the political philosophy that runs through all his writing: his belief that ‘socialism can improve social life, that the work we like best is not done for money, and that books and art are ...”

“... to take such drastic action at all? Our debt ratio was much higher after the Second World War and neither Attlee nor Churchill felt any obligation to do what Cameron, Clegg and Osborne have done. Even Darling’s proposed schedule of deficit reduction seems excessively prudent. A less political chancellor might simply have allowed economic recovery ...”

“... are like characters in a book to me. I began their story when I was little and it goes on like War and Peace.’ She never seems to hear the patronising note in her own voice. ‘I have known but one really dull Bohemian, and I have known a great many clever ones. You know Richard Wagner said that whenever he got dull he went to Prague. “There I renew my ...”

“... behind his throwing in the towel – among them his private income and his feeling that the war had put an end to the world he knew – it’s clear that the life he’d come to see as the antithesis of art’s ‘conventionalities’ was predominately gay life. Publishability was one problem; another was that Forster’s fiction seemed to need the ...”