“... I start crying at the informational video, which juxtaposes stiff ambassadorial footage of King Charles talking about his nonna with a female voice intoning: ‘She stood in tears amid the alien corn.’ I’M in the alien corn! The effect of poetry is reliable, still. Your skin gets a whole size smaller.Upstairs, I walk past the life-mask, with its visible ...”

“... saw libertarian economists such as James Buchanan, acting in concert with the right-wing zealot Charles Koch and lobbyists for corporations like Shell Oil, Exxon, Ford, IBM, Chase Manhattan Bank and General Motors, disseminating radical ideas through a pliable media and a new curriculum for economics education in universities. Partly as a result of their ...”

“... to do a fair amount of that.You weren’t encouraged, as we were, to go in for little whimsical Charles Lamb-like essays? Writing trivia about trivia?No. The senior English master was a raging Leavisite, an absolute caricature.Had he been to Cambridge?No, he’d been to Southampton and had been thoroughly instructed there by a sub-Leavisite. At that ...”

“... Stravinsky. Though Craft may not be the most reliable witness, as he also notes the presence of Charles Addams ‘and his wife, Deborah Kerr’. 24 September. Marcel Marceau dies. Much hated by Peter Cook (‘Marcel Arsehole’), who couldn’t stand the reverence with which mime was treated. Still it gave him a good joke: ‘I was there,’ he used to ...”

“... in 1968. Sartre and Simone de Beauvoir, C. Wright Mills and René Dumont, Ernesto Sábato and Charles Bettelheim were all dazzled. For one visiting British delegation, Eric Hobshawm acted as Che’s translator.In the autumn of 1960, in search of economic agreements, Guevara made his first visit to the Soviet Union. Anderson reveals that there had already ...”

“... Butt, who became a regular dinner guest at Wilde’s house in Westland Row, and the novelists Charles Lever and Sheridan Le Fanu. He also travelled to London and then to Vienna and Berlin to pursue his medical studies; he visited Prague, Munich and Brussels. In 1843 he published Austria, Its Literary, Scientific and Medical Institutions, and in 1849 a ...”

“... after Conlon had been charged, the police arrived at the hostel to question the residents. One, Charles Burke, gave a statement in which he said he had seen Conlon asleep in bed on the night of the bombing. The police passed Burke’s statement to the DPP, who subsequently sent it to the prosecution team, led by the late Sir Michael Havers; the juniors were ...”

“... and Cranbrook could just as easily be damned by conservative aesthetes in the mould of Prince Charles as having yoked the English working man to alien, totalitarian forms of dwelling.Lubetkin, who died in 1990, gave his critics plenty to work with. He did have an ego; he deployed his enormous intellect with more force than tact. He and his ...”

“... Brothers, Tessie O’Shea, Milton Babbitt, The Rough Guide to Rai, Gladys Knight and the Pips, Charles Trenet, Ska Almighty, John Dowland, the organ music of Johann Fux (heh heh), Ian Bostridge, the Ramones, Astor Piazzola, Ethel Merman’s Disco Album, Magnetic Fields, Flagstad and Svanholm in Die Walküre, Lord Kitchener and the Calypso All-Stars, Sonic ...”

“... five or ten or twenty quid note. On one side we have a famous dead person: Elizabeth Fry or Charles Darwin or Adam Smith, depending on whether it’s a five or ten or twenty. On the other we have a picture of the queen, and just above that the words ‘I promise to pay the bearer on demand the sum of’, and then the value of the note, and the signature ...”

“... West Germany’s 8-3 loss to Hungary in the group stage in 1954 is explicated via the theologian Martin Schloemann’s hypothesis that the saying derives not as commonly assumed from a remark of Luther’s, but rather from a 19th-century woodcut depiction of Luther that became a common symbol of reconstruction after the Second World War. There are footnotes ...”

“... Weber on. ‘You can’t just do that! This is why universities need walls!’It’s striking, as Martin Jay writes in an afterword to Marxist Modernism, that despite Rose’s great interest and expertise in Marx and in Frankfurt Marxism, she worked ‘entirely outside’ the great debates on the intellectual left of the 1980s. Althusser she ‘only ...”

“... It’s an old tactic and it is still in play around the Grenfell disaster. As soon as Martin Moore-Bick, the chair of the public inquiry, announced that he would be seeking answers rather than taking dictation from those with passionate feelings, he was dismissed as a ‘posh white man’. It was reported that the community felt he had ‘the ...”