“... and set the agenda for coalition with the Lib Dems. It became widely unpopular in 2012, when George Osborne made clear that high-income earners would endure less austerity than everyone else. The polarising effects of the cuts and the rise in university tuition fees then conveniently destroyed the Lib Dem brand and any threat it might have posed to the ...”

“... Barton suggests that Shakespeare does not show in his earlier plays the sympathy for the urban crowd that we find in Coriolanus. This is imprecise criticism. In fact Coriolanus is technically interesting for the manner in which it succeeds a. in telling us that the people are actually starving and b. in suppressing our natural pity (this, from the ...”

“... While the memo left the number of victims blank, Backe’s arithmetic suggested that the entire urban population of the European Soviet Union – thirty million ‘surplus eaters’ – should be starved to death.The Hungerplan, to give it its German proper name, began with the forcible starving of Soviet prisoners of war. Crowded into vast camps without ...”

“... stage of her adult life: they also provide a running commentary on her times. She is a witness to George III’s derangement in 1788, sequestered with him and the Queen in the Palace at Kew. She attends the trial of Warren Hastings. She experiences the Napoleonic regime first-hand during an enforced stay in France between 1803 and 1812. In her teens and ...”

“... claim had come back to broadcasting, but certainly not to the coterie in the Stag’s Head and the George. Encouraged by the indulgent atmosphere around him, MacNeice from the beginning put the medium to an essentially private use. Those of his plays which purport to have a public theme – like Enter Caesar (1946) – in fact express deep suspicion of public ...”

“... records of the Irish Catholic poor in 1966: the churches that often stood in ‘half-deserted urban wastelands’ created by slum clearance; the ‘lumber-room of the town hall’ where he unearthed documents; the dinners he shared with a Wigan priest in a ‘tobacco-stained waistcoat’ and his Irish-born housekeeper. In the 19th century, Irish migrants ...”

“... peacekeepers now serve there. Senior Chinese leaders have been making two visits a year to Africa (George Bush has not visited the continent during his second term), and last November nearly every African leader attended a major summit in Beijing. China’s poor labour standards, environmental policies and human rights failings were once issues only for people ...”

“... that his children’s English nanny, with whom he may have had an affair, was a spy sent by Lloyd George, and paced the family home brandishing a revolver. He committed himself to a hospital in Hamburg, before moving to a private clinic in Jena in 1920 and then to Ludwig Binswanger’s Bellevue sanatorium in Kreuzlingen, where other postwar burnouts included ...”

“... the 1890s, with the novel Foma Gordeyev and a collection of his essays and stories which imported urban proletarian characters into Russian literature. He was born in Nizhny Novgorod in 1868 as Alexei Peshkov. His pen name meant bitter, signalling the way his life story was the guarantee of his work’s authenticity – this autodidact orphan who had ...”

“... take on this touchy matter is provided by Sinatra’s long-time (African-American) valet, George Jacobs. In his immensely entertaining memoir Mr S: The Last Word on Frank Sinatra (2003), he defends Sinatra and the other Rat Pack roustabouts, and says the only people he ever got a real nasty sizzle of racism from were a few Mafia bosses, and the ...”

“... debutantes were presented at Buckingham Palace; and, thanks to some genealogical ingenuity, George VI was recognised as the latest monarch in the ancient line of Kandyan kings. While the rest of the empire in Asia smouldered – in India there was Partition, in Malaya the Emergency, in Burma the civil war – Ceylon became Whitehall’s model for the ...”

“... of 19 January 1979. Bomb-carriers, from The Secret Agent to Paul Theroux’s Deptford-based urban terrorists in The Family Arsenal, have delighted in targeting Greenwich domes. There is something in the nature of the place, a residue of royalty and privilege and congenital self-satisfaction: the old dockside dowager has painted herself up for the ...”

“... took hold. And when he woke, somewhere in South Carolina, Sam was saying how much he admired George W. Bush. ‘I voted for Bush last time,’ he said. ‘I liked the way he handled 9/11. He’s a strong president. Hell, he’s my commander-in-chief.’ Terry gave him a long, weary look, and rubbed his eyes. Neither Sam nor Terry has ever possessed a ...”

“... and means good. ‘We would rather have “Fra Lippo Lippi” than an essay on Realism in Art,’ George Eliot said in her warm and insightful review of Men and Women, the collection in which the poem was published, without question Browning’s masterpiece. She singled out for similar admiration a passage from another poem in the book, ‘How It Strikes a ...”