“... and, like them, he often wrote of beleaguered men who struggle with a world that seems to be ‘sagging, snagging, scaling, spalling, pilling, pinging, pitting, warping, checking, fading, chipping, cracking, yellowing, leaking, stalling, shrinking’. The battle of the ‘little man’ with daily disobligingness is a classic New Yorker trope; the ...”

“... prospective Tory donors typically involved ‘a long lunch during which his victim was flattered by being told how highly rated they were by the prime minister before being “stung” for large amounts of cash’, the Telegraph wrote. The technique clearly worked: before McAlpine became party treasurer in 1975, the Tories ...”

“... their employers and conquered the island themselves. Though Bede still listed ‘British’ (by which he meant an old version of Celtic) as one of Britain’s five languages, along with English, Pictish, Scottish and Latin, by his lifetime the Britons had been marginalised to the remotest northern and western corners ...”

“... whom Clare regarded as ‘the first of Rural Bards’. It seems unjust that Clare should be denied a proper job when he worked so hard, not only in the fields, lime kilns and parks but also at his desk, producing some ten thousand pages. But at least, unlike Edward Capern, he was spared the indignity of being called the Postman Poet.Clare was born in ...”

“... about the singularity. No matter how you define it, we are either already in it or about to be there. If Elon Musk is right (though he did predict we’d be living on Mars by now), AI will surpass the sum of all human intelligence in five years and exceed human control within ...”

“... day and raining still, as it has been for the last week. Around four it eases off and we walk up by the lake. The waterfall at the top of the village is tumultuous, though the torrent has never been as powerful as it was in 1967 when (perhaps melodramatically) I envisaged the lake dam breaking and engulfing the whole village. The lake itself is always black ...”

“... Myth​ is a story that can be retold by anyone, with infinite variation, and still be recognisable as itself. The outline of surviving myth is re-recognised in the lives of each generation. It’s an instrument by which people simplify, rationalise and retell social complexities ...”

“... what was going on in his mind is a matter for speculation. In October 1940, his asthma exacerbated by the dust from the bombing, he left London and moved to a cottage in Hampshire, in a village called Steep, where he lived for two years. Andrew Sinclair, in Francis Bacon: His Life and Violent Times (1993), includes a few sentences on his stay. Daniel ...”

“... 1990s. ‘Britain and other advanced capitalist societies’ were ‘increasingly characterised by diversity, differentiation and fragmentation, rather than homogeneity, standardisation and the economies and organisations of scale which characterised modern mass society’. This was the ‘epochal’ shift from Fordism to post-Fordism, the late capitalist ...”

“... of the Troubles, in a mixed working-class district that is cleared of its Catholic residents by a loyalist mob. Paving stones are lifted to barricade the end of the street. Neighbourhood vigilantes are replaced by paramilitaries and the British army. Though the representation of events is spare and often stylised, the ...”

“... LP that my younger brothers and I listened to obsessively, despite the number of duds that had to be skipped along the way. We didn’t know the song had originally been written and performed by the light entertainer Max Bygraves, but intuited that McLaren’s version was an assault on the middle-aged and middle of the ...”

“... Press (a publishing division of the Episcopalian Church) he spotted four anomalous hardcovers, all by an author with a peculiar name: Memoirs Found in a Bathtub, The Futurological Congress, The Invincible and The Cyberiad. Two – Invincible and Memoirs – had covers easily recognisable as ‘SF art’. The jackets were designed ...”

“... in February 1936 after dining with the Channons: Honor and her husband, Henry, whom everyone knew by his nickname ‘Chips’, but who wasn’t Lord Channon, much as he longed to be. ‘Why am I not very very rich – and a peer?’ he asked in 1924, as a 27-year-old American recently arrived in England. He did become very ...”

“... producer of the Light Programme’s Hello Children, wrote to Enid Blyton to ask whether she would be willing to be interviewed about the best holiday she could remember. ‘Dear Mr Gamlin,’ Blyton wrote the next day. ‘Thank you for your nice letter. It all sounds very interesting but I ought to warn you of something you ...”

“... are constitutionally bound to the principles of good housekeeping. Further measures will be needed for the banks – but all in good time. The euro has survived; order has been restored. The new status quo is already a significant achievement. Seen from the besieged parliaments of Athens and Madrid, from the shuttered shops and boarded-up homes in ...”