“... and professionalism’ then refused to appoint a government anti-corruption adviser – the post has been vacant since the height of the Partygate scandal. According to a poll published earlier this year, people are more likely to associate economic crime with politicians than with oligarchs or business executives.During the general election ...”

“... of the popular marketplace? Or is there a third way, which remints the public service ethos for a post-deferential age? Because the BBC was not and has not been sent to market in the most obvious way – by abolishing the licence fee – people have tended to assume that the transformation which occurred in the 1990s was self-imposed. But as Georgina Born ...”

“... cent. Obviously, this lasted only as long as the Empire did. The last director general with even post-colonial experience was Stella Rimington, who was talent-spotted in (independent) India, where her husband worked at the British High Commission. When this source dried up it caused recruitment problems. While it still operated, however, its bearing on the ...”

“... the long novel is an ocean with tides, capable of wearing down a thousand sharp edges. A book like Jonathan Littell’s The Kindly Ones can safely include an episode after a few hundred pages that has nothing in common with what surrounds it. An old man, claiming to be over 120, comes to see the Nazi narrator, effectively offering himself up for extermination ...”

“... the start single-subject honours degrees were unknown, and where modular courses moved towards a Post-Modernist ‘pick and mix’. Sociology was a dominant influence on the ‘new wave’ history of the time. In the new cottage industry of urban history, monographs, when they began to appear, typically focused on stratification and social structure. Past ...”

“... did? When the Licensing Act wasn’t renewed in 1695, pre-publication censorship was replaced by post-publication scrutiny and prosecution under the common law of libel. As far as successive governments during the long 18th century were concerned, whether or not a publication was classed as seditious had as much to do with its medium as its message, with its ...”

“... that the vision is itself disseminated and dispersed. The weight of allusion is so great that Jonathan Culler remarks, in Structuralism and Since, that Dissemination is ‘Derrida’s most forbidding and difficult book’.If the reader is familiar with Derrida’s earlier work, though, there are enough cues in Dissemination to see what is going ...”

“... to live without her? Yet the carte postale of Duse might seem even more cherishable. Despite her Post-Modern household location – propped up like a jokey little icon next to the Body Shop bottles on the bathroom shelf – Duse exudes, well, a certain sublimity. She’s all in black, in some kind of elegant, judicial-looking, Portia-like robe, and leans ...”

“... things like anti-semitism or fear of Freemasons, which belong more properly to the world of post-Salem paranoia and have been ably dealt with by Professor Richard Hofstadter in his study The Paranoid Style in American Politics, then modern American conspiracy theory begins with the Warren Commission. There had been toxic political speculation at high ...”

“... potatoes by the score.’ (This lovelorn plea also features a treated oboe solo.) Eno’s post-Roxy lyrics have a similarly English flavour: ‘Ooh what to do, not a sausage to do!’ From a distance, Bryan and Brian may have looked worlds apart, but their work is laid out like two discrete English gardens: buttercups and daisies, sunsets and ...”

“... began​ with a walk-in. In August 2010 a former senior Pakistani intelligence officer approached Jonathan Bank, then the CIA’s station chief at the US embassy in Islamabad. He offered to tell the CIA where to find bin Laden in return for the reward that Washington had offered in 2001. Walk-ins are assumed by the CIA to be unreliable, and the response from ...”

“... Brick, has vanished into the vault, as have Noah Baumbach’s unfinished pilot for a TV version of Jonathan Franzen’s The Corrections, starring Ewan McGregor, Maggie Gyllenhaal and Greta Gerwig, a Ridley Scott-directed pilot for a rejected show called The Vatican, and many others.After Chase shot the pilot for The Sopranos, ten months went by before HBO got ...”

“... its medical industries. The US has provided some of the WHO’s most dynamic figures, notably Jonathan Mann, who led the organisation’s response to the spread of Aids in the 1980s. In narrative fiction and non-fiction, a stock figure has emerged: the brave, principled, maverick American researcher who leaves the safety of the homeland to plunge into the ...”

“... the most touching and tender moments in these works, something it is awkward to point out in our post-Freudian age. The aristocratic Almanach-de-Gotha family lines form a web that transects the whole of the Wehrmacht; their mirror-image is the party network that resists, subtends and extends far beyond them.Bora’s psychology is, however, another matter, as ...”

“... Whisper’) and shopped it around to record labels, but ‘Wham Rap!’s message clashed with the post-Falklands mood of triumphant Thatcherite aspiration.Only Innervision, a start-up label backed by CBS Records, would take a chance on Wham! (the name of the label evokes Stevie Wonder’s 1973 album). It was good timing: Michael’s father – never an ...”