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“... add up to something incontestably grand, the nearest we have today to the great cycles of upper-class English life published in the decades after the war – Dance to the Music of Time or Evelyn Waugh’s Sword of Honour. They combine a distinctive and exotic subject – appalling posh people – with a universal ...”

“... was for the miners’ own good, and a testy note about Saddam’s hanging, though nothing on the war. With formidable realism, Desmond is shown to be far more exercised by ‘art-bollocks’, ‘creeping Christmas’, mobile phones, target-driven education, holiday camps, foreign films, Viagra spam – a bumper edition of Grumpy Old Men, in other words. But ...”

“... another, yet the ‘journey’ aspect is given hardly any significance; instinct tells us not to class it as a ‘travel book’. By contrast, in the case of Goethe’s Italian Journey, it is the journey itself, which is by no means altogether planned and develops rather like a work of art, that counts most. One could even, metaphorically, call it an ...”

“... insects to be studied under glass’. He did not address ‘social injustice, violence or war under capitalism’. Goffman’s actors were men and women in grey flannel suits who did not resist, ‘they conformed to the requirements of a local and global capitalism that erased class, race and gender in the name of a ...”

“... world. On balance, this aspect of the story struck me as not very plausible, what with the Cold War having ended some time back. The Russian spy is, however, of some interest in his own right. Like the chap in Gilbert and Sullivan, he’s an inadvertent source of merriment. Lloyd’s dialogue rarely strikes the ear as convincing. (‘Your theory of ...”

“... rebellion – or rather ensemble of rebellions – took the form of ‘petite guerre’, a phoney war of localised raids and skirmishes, rather than major confrontations. The outcome was decided in two near simultaneous battles in mid-November 1715, at Sherrifmuir near Stirling and at Preston. If the former was inconclusive, though marked by massive Jacobite ...”

“... a political consensus on taxation and welfare reform, British parties have lost their policy (and class) distinctiveness and become more like the electoral machines of their leaders, as is largely the case in America. Tony Blair’s celebrated ‘project’, guided by Philip Gould, dismantled the rambling institutions that formed the Labour coalition and ...”

“... Like Farocki, Steyerl is fascinated by the increased automation not only of labour and war but also of seeing and imaging, and by the subjectless operations of information processing. Along with Paglen and Weizman, she bears down on the control by corporations and governments, through satellite imaging and information mining, of what is given to us ...”

“... Political Justice went off like a bomb in the heightened atmosphere of 1790s Britain, at war with revolutionary France and with a government intensely suspicious of radical activity at home. ‘No work in our time gave such a blow,’ Hazlitt recalled. ‘Tom Paine was considered for the time as a Tom Fool to him.’ The book was exorbitantly ...”

“... and ‘planning’ movements in Britain and Europe before, during and after the Second World War has suggested that those movements drew their direct inspiration at least as much from the ‘positivist’ legacy of Comte (and his mentor Saint-Simon) as from the more obvious influences of either democratic socialism or Soviet-style Marxism. Some of the ...”

“... of analogies – from Yuri Gagarin’s spaceflight to a Chris Marker documentary about the Pacific War and Dickens’s A Christmas Carol – to help her navigate the territory. Some are more successful than others, but they all expose the doubleness of Chilean society in a period when life could be either peaceful or extremely dangerous, depending on who you ...”

“... Harm, an advocacy group launched in 2016, which supports families and aims to end ‘the failed war on drugs’. She says that not everyone using drugs fits the stereotypes. ‘These kids played softball and soccer and joined the boy scouts.’ Her son started using drugs as a teenager, first OxyContin – the prescription opioid made by Purdue Pharma which ...”

“... flags featuring the watchword ‘Jai Shri Ram’ (hail Ram), which doubles as a greeting and a war cry for the Hindu right, appeared across New Delhi. Models of the temple went on display at shopping malls; ornate banners of Modi and Ram hung from footbridges. It was hard to believe that such a transformation had been wrought by the inauguration of a ...”

“... brilliant essays on television and tennis. When French TV started revisiting the Second World War, Daney suggested that Pétain had become a name for what was still being hidden or denied – a saint, a puppet, ‘only a signifier’. In an endless match against Jimmy Connors, John McEnroe was the bearer of a fable: ‘The winner won’t be the one who ...”

“... wrote nearly all the group’s best tunes, only to be pushed out for being a Beatles-loving middle-class namby.) Andrew Loog Oldham, who managed the Rolling Stones, was the crucial precursor in grasping that bad publicity was useful – something to be actively sought, even fabricated. But he hadn’t featured so prominently in the coverage of his clients as ...”