“... it’s being republished now with the open aim of reaching the sizeable audience that resurrected John Williams’s Stoner and Richard Yates’s Revolutionary Road. All three books share an interest in sad marriages and a certain amount of diffuse self-pity, but strenuous Flaubertian realism as practised on a mid-20th-century American campus, provided in ...”

“... because a new Israeli coalition was being formed and needed time to settle in. The talks never took place. The lesson for Hamas was clear. Even if an agreement was brokered by the US and Egypt, Israel could still fail to honour it. Yet Hamas largely continued to maintain the ceasefire to Israel’s satisfaction. It set up a new police force tasked with ...”

“... that is, of a violent, apparently purposeful activity that wasn’t in any real sense planned. I took that as a metaphor for a lot of things in the Soviet Union. Hatherley has a tough-minded approach to huge empty spaces, although he acknowledges that crossing them can be daunting. He views my bête noire, the 1960s-modern Kalinin Prospekt, with relative ...”

“... is following Gramsci’s example within one’s own society.’ In 2006, again in the LRB, he took the same attitude towards Marx, suggesting that Marx and Engels’s Rhineland origins was the key to their interpretation of capitalism’s development: Marxism was ‘a Rhineland-based diversion of global history, mistaken for the mainstream during a ...”

“... thought of joint task forces, they even tended accidentally to act in concert. The adventure that took America’s marines ‘to the shores of Tripoli’ was an expedition against Mediterranean pirates that anticipated both countries’ later efforts to clear pirates from the South China seas, and President Reagan’s strike on Tripoli in 1986. When in the ...”

“... it must be said, from accepting the advice of businessmen and bankers. Depression and recovery took place against the background of a monotonous litany, familiar now to British ears, intoned by the world of big business: that wages and social security costs were too high, that the law should be changed to ‘de-bureaucratise’ the labour contract, that ...”

“... status of the ‘head of the respondent’s family’ and no less than 8 per cent of the sample took this to refer to the respondent’s mother. Even so, says Halsey, ‘the data have been organised so that ... these variables are all labelled as characteristics of their non-existent father’! If subjective phenomena such as social-class identity are to be ...”

“... and only four months after US troops had arrived in the southern half of Korea. Few in the West took the trouble then to find out about the nature of the Korean revolution. Few were even honest enough to acknowledge that it existed. And almost no one in the West has conceded that this is what the Korean War of 1950-53 – a civil war delayed by outside ...”

“... affiliations remain concealed. The arrival of Hugo Young at the Guardian was part of a swop that took Peter Jenkins to the Sunday Times. Much respected for intelligence and integrity, Peter Jenkins ought to be our most influential political commentator. But there has been a more tentative and less radical thrust to his column than used to be the case and an ...”

“... but there is, as far as I know, no evidence for this. Of the attempted assassination of Pope John Paul II Laqueur can only comment that ‘the extent of Bulgarian involvement cannot be proven in a court of law,’ as if only an excess of legal fastidiousness – rather than a complete lack of evidence – stands in the way of our believing this ...”

“... called by Aleksei Navalny, one of the instigators of the massive anti-regime demonstrations that took place on 10 December, is evident from the corruption which, according to Harding, ‘has increased sixfold under Putin’s rule’. Escaping the draft, registering a company, buying an apartment, getting into school, passing an exam, being acquitted of ...”

“... has to be tested not simply against the views of Assange’s lawyers and helpmates, but those of John Bellinger, for example, a former legal counsel for the State Department, who told AP television news in 2010 that bringing charges against Assange while he was still in the UK would put a loyal ally on the spot by generating a rival extradition ...”

“... crisis, the corporation had to sell in order to keep building – and, once Thatcher’s policies took hold, at a price well below market rates. Renters, unsurprisingly, knew a good deal when they saw it; very quickly, the balance between owners and renters turned around. In 1979, 41 per cent of houses in Milton Keynes were owner-occupied; four years later ...”

“... said of his meal with Giscard, ‘a myth hunter … must hunt everywhere.’ That lunch, which took place in a flat in the Marais on 25 February 1980, with Lang doing the cooking, apparently went quite well. But then Barthes, en route back to his office, walked into the path of a laundry van, which left him unconscious and bleeding from the nose. He ...”

“... film-maker and accountant were members, along with Rotten – now using his more sober real name, John Lydon – and three other musicians. In October, PiL released their first product, a single called, with corporate thoroughness, ‘Public Image’. It was a streamlined, surging noise that hadn’t been heard before, and reached number nine in the ...”