“... at least as powerful a driver of policy in this government as in any of its predecessors, has a keen interest in the cost of the new system. Once the terms are set, the main determinant of cost is student numbers. The Treasury therefore insists that numbers be capped. (They have in fact been reduced, first by the removal of a temporary increase of ten ...”

“... Charles Vaughan, chief of staff of Thiel Capital, owned by the billionaire former Trump supporter Peter Thiel, and Jordan Peterson, who was invited by Orr and other academics to be a visiting fellow at the Cambridge Faculty of Divinity in 2019. After a photo emerged of Peterson with a man wearing a T-shirt with the slogan ‘I’m a proud ...”

“... of Judea? We are here for the official opening of a conference – not a celebration, they are keen to stress – to commemorate the glorious memory of the 19 men who killed themselves in flying four planes into the Twin Towers, the Pentagon and the ground. ‘The world is now split into two camps. It has become clear that there can never be peace with the ...”

“... now at an East Coast prep school. (Yup, she’s hot.) Myself, mid-twenties and single, but mad keen on it all: Imminent Global Sapphic Takeover, that is. Aggressive, competitive, exorbitantly heterosexual Poet Lady with long flowing hair. Thirty years later, one of the Reigning Poetry Divas of Our Time. Poet Lady [in great excitement, to the ...”

“... say she was tired, she was ‘all done up’; petrol was ‘juice’ and if she wasn’t keen on doing something she’d say ‘I’m darned if I will.’ All her conversation was impregnated with the vocabulary of her peculiar brand of Catholic fanaticism (‘the dire importance of justice deeds’). It was the language of the leaflets she ...”

“... That sounds like fair comment. Among other contemporaries there were novelists who took a keen practitioner’s interest in developing new ways of relating fabula and syuzhet and, as a mark of their difference, avoiding the straightforward representation of causality, desiring to alter the emphasis, to light scenes in a way that could not be achieved ...”

“... gym I belong to – became existential torture devices. No more Frasier reruns or baseball: just Peter Jennings and dirty bombs.The boys with tattoos flexed nervously. Even the female-to-male transsexuals looked shaken. (It’s a gay gym.) I went through my own quiet days feeling gusty, shocked and forlorn. Blakey was still in Chicago. One evening I broke ...”

“... atmosphere, he said, was making the planet greener.Wasn’t it strange, I said, that Blyth was so keen on an anti-net-zero political party, when the town had become so economically dependent on green energy investment? ‘It’s quite paradoxical, isn’t it?’ Ridley replied. ‘Because the biggest industry in Blyth is very dependent on net zero,’ he ...”

“... from Marseille to Oran and come overland in the hope of obtaining a visa to Lisbon. Ugarte (Peter Lorre), a forger and procurer of documents, asks Rick to look after two sets of safe-conduct papers until his clients arrive. ‘You despise me, don’t you?’ he says to Rick. ‘You object to the kind of business I do, huh? But think of all those poor ...”

“... the former speaking on occasion of his ‘childlike innocence’, the latter comparing him to Peter Pan. Gopal’s image is more telling still: early on, Nehru ‘made a cradle of emotional nationalism and rocked himself in it’, as if a child cocooning himself to sleep away from the outside world. He had, of course, many more adult qualities: hard ...”