“... we choose not to refer to them, we still drag there with us the cultural impedimenta of our social class, our parents’ lives, our bank balances, our sexual and emotional expectations, our unique biographies – all the bits and pieces of our unique existences.’ In other words, sex, which people pretend to believe is intimate and private, actually has an ...”

“... reality is wider than it is on the domestic front. Putin came to power on the crest of a colonial war. In March 1999, the West launched its attack on Yugoslavia. Planning for the reconquest of Chechnya began that same month, under Yeltsin. In early August, Putin – then head of the FSB – was made prime minister. In the last week of September, invoking ...”

“... and water people,’ he wrote in the Irish World,I am talking to those who mean fight, who mean war and who know what war is. When an enslaved nation can produce men who are brave and daring enough to risk life and to face death for the mere glory of showing that the national spirit still lives, that nation is not dead ...”

“... North Atlantic trading economy whose long decline, and the consequent sectarian battle for working-class jobs, was the economic basis for the current cycle of the Troubles, dating from the hungry 1960s. The Harland and Wolff shipyard, once the busiest in the world, now refurbishes the odd ferry and tugboat. But Belfast and the North generally seem to have ...”

“... of elementary rights to which we and the rest of Europe signed up in the aftermath of World War Two, the Human Rights Act has become the scapegoat for half the things that go wrong in the state and civil society. A paragraph from the Sun reminds one what rational discourse in this field is up against: ‘Tony Blair was attacked last night for refusing ...”

“... more complicated. Born in Bradford in 1894, Priestley, after extensive service in the First World War and three years at Cambridge, had embarked in the early 1920s on the precarious career of a man of letters, turning his hand to criticism, essays and novels, all written in haste, none enjoying much success. The income from a collaborative work with the much ...”

“... gave up and unpacked my bags and waited another five years. For decades, the paths that led out of war, destruction and poverty into the safety of life in Europe was a closely guarded secret, the property of smugglers and mafias who controlled the routes and had a monopoly on the necessary knowledge. They conducted their illicit trade out of dingy cafés in ...”

“... of the Depression, fears of postwar stagnation, and the geopolitics of decolonisation and the Cold War. The challenges of growth and industrialisation – the obstacles to achieving them, but also the dislocation and inequality they often entailed – weren’t just a matter of investment, technology and productivity. They were also, in the words of Simon ...”

“... enrich management and shareholders, and circumscribe worker militancy. Outside the US, as the Cold War raged, management consultants were willing foot soldiers in the global battle for capitalism. A 1960 report by the New York Times exalted the US firms that were ‘aggressively’ packaging and marketing management advice on ‘whatever their specialities ...”

“... dilute Catholic influence and loosen their grip on their serf estates. Satirists enjoyed the ‘war between periwigs and whiskers’ but Butterwick writes that ‘the atmosphere of enlightened but deeply emotional patriotism … bridged political divides … This ferment and a change in international circumstances were about to launch the Commonwealth on ...”

“... us in three earlier books digested into State School (1970) – while he was teaching before the war at the Forest School in Hampshire, an endearing place run by the Order of Woodcraft Chivalry. The pupils’ readiness to move up a class was tested by their ability to swim the Avon fully clothed, write a critique of an ...”

“... Pompilia, putative daughter of Pietro and Violante Comparini, a moderately wealthy middle-class couple. Shortly after the marriage, Guido, his wife and his parents-in-law moved from Rome to Arezzo. Subsequently the Comparini returned to Rome, claiming ill-treatment by Guido; Violante then publicly confessed that Pompilia was not really her child, but ...”

“... including a shipboard ballot had been followed. On this occasion, Prescott plays the working class patriot and statesman in the Bevin mould and does it rather well – exuding an expansive sense of power being within reach at last.1 May 1997. Run into John Eatwell, formerly economic adviser to the hapless Neil Kinnock and now Lord Eatwell, President of ...”

“... tell your worst enemy. Hide from him in the supermarket. Avoid eye contact. Never go out to war with one; never share his drugs. And never, never kiss a writer. Never kiss one no matter what. At the hard core of American writing this century, these would appear to be the big lessons. And they all crumble down to one thing in the end: never trust a ...”

“... the dire’. Brockett may not be a real man but even he is man enough to enlist in the First World War, and demands that custard creams be sent to him in the trenches. The manly Stephen can only become an ambulance driver – her unit, in fact, is staffed largely by ‘inverts’, members, like her, of the ‘third sex’. Hall was influenced by the work of ...”