“... to be found mainly among the professional middle classes, that ran through the Forties’. Yet Richard Acland, figurehead of the Party, had been a Liberal MP before the war, and Common Wealth might be placed on the far left wing of that broad informal alliance of reformers which produced what Addison calls ‘Forties ...”

“... warning against ‘an unexamined habit of mind into which we fall when we treat of history on the broad scale’, his use of the first-person plural indicates a predicament he shares. This, and not the prevalence of Protestant and progressive allegiances, or even, quite, the failing of writing about the past ‘with direct and perpetual reference to the ...”

“... author also of Amazing Grace: The Story of America’s Most Beloved Song and a biography of Cliff Richard – can’t be unaware of the implied contrast with the Paschal lamb of Exodus 12.46 and the fulfilment of the Scripture in the Gospel of John, chapter 19 (‘Then came the soldiers, and brake the legs of the first, and of the other which was crucified ...”

“... following Harriet’s disappearance with a scene after her rescue, is easily explained when Richard son’s novel is consulted. Since he was telling his story in letters, he had to follow a letter reporting Harriet’s disappearance with a letter reporting her safe and well at Colnebrook; the exciting details of what had happened in between could be ...”

“... on the wall of things-from-1963: a poster for Psycho, a programme for a new musical starring Richard Burton and Julie Andrews called Camelot, an advertisement for Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf? There is a row of books from the time: Barbara Tuchman’s The Guns of August; Betty Friedan’s The Feminine Mystique; The Rise and Fall of the Third Reich by ...”

“... again, the wildness of satire was turned into an object of moral admiration. The cartoons were broad-gauge, and looked to get a rise out of the credulous – a very different thing from Rushdie’s tactics of ambiguity and metafiction; coming from non-Muslim French artists, they made a conspicuous instance of satire from high to low. The watchwords of ...”

“... fronting both magazines at the same time. In June 1974, two months before Watergate drove his boss Richard Nixon from office, Newsweek portrayed Kissinger as ‘Super K’ in full hero outfit, muscles rippling, cape swirling. He knew it was too good to last: those whom the gods wish to destroy they first dress up as Superman. Gewen describes the absurdity of ...”

“... preoccupations. And yet we are encouraged – it is a training requirement – to read quite a broad range of relevant theory. On any given day can this page of Lacan, that paper by Sullivan, this concept of Klein’s be meaningful to me? The more diligent self I need for my official education may read it all, week in, week out. From the point of view of ...”

“... his life. (In March 2005 Condoleezza Rice described the US-Pakistan relationship since 9/11 as ‘broad and deep’.) Had he not, after all, unravelled Pakistan’s one military victory in order to please Washington? General Mahmood Ahmed, who headed the ISI, was in Washington as a guest of the Pentagon, trying to convince the Defense Intelligence Agency that ...”

“... Thomist. Nuptials of Christ, which illustrated being ‘fucked by Christ’, flustered even the broad-minded McNabb, but Gill was able to get a compliant priest to give an imprimatur to his books of erotic etchings.After Gill’s death in 1940, Greene gently dismissed him as a grubby eccentric. Yet he too became a ‘Protestant in the bosom of the ...”

“... a constellation of needs that are dealt with in straight society outside the arena of sex,’ Richard Goldstein argued in the Village Voice in 1983. ‘For gay men, sex, that most powerful implement of attachment and arousal, is also an agent of communion, replacing an often hostile family and even shaping politics. It represents an ecstatic break with ...”

“... the torrid sheet in purple. Her face, also in shadow, is almost featureless – there are two broad strokes of mauve across her cheekbones, like sticking plasters. I can’t convey the subtlety of the colouring (nor can a reproduction). But I can insist on the delicacy and variety of the dipping brushstrokes, on how softened and edgeless everything is: a ...”

“... am not a weathercock.’ Defending ordinary members of the Party, he declared his fidelity to the broad traditions of socialism. The following day, at bay in the White House, he still resisted the clamour from the floor that he should now help to ‘drive socialism out of this land’, and vainly tried to halt Yeltsin’s decree with the cry ‘Be a democrat ...”

“... five squadrons to establish airfields in the land between the hills of the Asiago plateau and the broad valley of the Piave, and several airmen were also interred there. We were looking for the grave of a particular British pilot, Lieutenant Van Dyke Fernald, who was shot down at Godega, near Conegliano, in July 1918. He may have accidentally broken formation ...”

“... slow swing replaced by a nocturne. The station cut in again with a learned authority, ‘Professor Richard Pierson, famous astronomer’, direct from the Princeton observatory to explain the discharge and point out that Mars could not support intelligent life. Pierson, however, confessed that he could not explain the regularity of the emissions. More ...”