“... sergeant major is a can of McEwens lager.10 March. The Independent pursues its campaign against John Birt over his tax arrangements. On another page it boasts its acquisition of Jim Slater as its Stock Exchange commentator.13 March. To Weston to see Mam, who is dulleyed, expressionless, absent. The sun is hot through the blinds and the radio full ...”

“... duly formed democratic assemblies and experimented with organic agriculture; female members took leadership roles. The goal was to incubate self-governed Kurdish institutions within the Turkish state, resorting to violence only if their autonomy was threatened. ‘We will put Bookchin’s ideas into practice as the first society that establishes a ...”

“... cannot be unseen’.Certainly Schmitt couldn’t unsee it, though he turned it on its head. He took Bosch to be a painter of enmity, not love, and understood the prime enemy in The Garden to be ‘the egomaniac’, as figured in the central panel of human commingling: ‘This is nature and natural law, suspension of self-alienation and self-externalisation ...”

“... uncannily familiar figure of my old acquaintance the doctor, Buñuel’s pal José-Luis Barros. It took me a while to place the recognised face, and of course I didn’t fill in all the details even then. A few years later I met Buñuel in Mexico. He was delighted when I told him the story – he loved coincidences – and thought it would have been even ...”

“... Oxford who caused him concern’: he believed him to be his illegitimate brother. Her grandfather John Horatio Lloyd had, in the 1830s, ‘exposed himself in the Temple Gardens’ and run ‘naked in the sight of some nursemaids’, thus losing the opportunity to become solicitor-general. He ‘was forced to retire from political and legal work for four ...”

“... starched cotton petticoat; long drawers; woollen stockings; a chemise; and a whalebone corset that took her viscera in a stern hand and squeezed them very tightly. She also strapped a heavy linen napkin between her legs because she was menstruating. In all these clothes, out of sorts and nauseous as she was, in this dementing heat, her belly in a vice, she ...”

“... targeted the kitchen first, and acquired a few ginger biscuits which were too hard to bite into. I took them upstairs and placed them under my pillow. I moved on to the other rooms, all of which had the same indifferent smell of absence. In the master bedroom, I found a jewellery box sitting on a vanity table. It was empty, but gradually, I found some treasure ...”

“... disincentive to illegal entry than any man-made obstacle. Border vigilance in its present form took shape in the 1990s under the first Clinton administration. In 1993 the Border Patrol in Texas reacted to large numbers of illegal crossings near El Paso with high-profile reinforcement. Operation Gatekeeper, designed to stem illegal migrant flows at San ...”

“... September, and had made an additional $72 million in 2001 from his stock options.) On 25 July, John Rigas, the former head of Adelphia Communications, was arrested, along with his two sons, on corporate crime charges. They were accused of using the company ‘as the Rigas family’s personal piggy-bank’, spending hundreds of millions of the ...”

“... the State, and Law and Order (1978), written in collaboration with Chas Critcher, Tony Jefferson, John Clarke and Brian Roberts, but with its great and terrifying sweeps of synthesis – not to mention their calm, dry, paddingly Socratic delivery – commonly assumed to be the work mainly of Hall. Everywhere the ‘moral and intellectual leadership’ of the ...”

“... improved prisons, built libraries, decisively challenged the slave trade. But work of this order took off from a base of peculiar narrowness: a hostility to civilised manifestations of art and intellect, and a linked withdrawal from many other kinds of commitment to this world. In A Gathered Church (1978), a work that has considerable respect for Puritan ...”

“... office in Clare Street where the family quantity surveying business was run. In December 1931, he took in Perugino’s Pietà, newly acquired by the gallery. ‘It’s buried behind a formidable barrage of shining glass, so that one is obliged to take cognisance of it progressively, square inch by square inch. It’s all messed up by restorers,’ he ...”

“... were four gommoni on the water, within minutes of the Italian beaches. The lieutenant at the helm took his speed up to about 45 knots, flipping the boat over the waves. Garbled co-ordinates, crumbling with static, came through from the base radio. After a surge of movement that brought us within a kilometre of the coast, we slowed up and hung in the ...”

“... conviction about the European Community was complete, his experience of it was negligible. When he took office as President in 1977, unlike most United Kingdom ministers he had conducted no business in the Councils or with the Commission. From a distance, it was easy to believe that a strong President might run affairs rather like a prime minister, choosing ...”

“... freely as terms of approval and abuse (often in relation to Britain and Hollywood respectively). John Caughie contributes a sharp set of notes on broadcasting and the cinema, among other things tracing the influence of Scottish Presbyterianism on Grierson and Reith. Barr, in another essay in the same vein, points out how radio was seen as socially cohesive ...”