“... the British Prime Minister and Foreign Secretary do the same. In one historian’s words, Balfour took up Zionism as a kind of hobby, and the Declaration that bears his name was less the outcome of a serious examination of British or Allied interests than of his own uninformed infatuation – he did not think the Arab problem was serious or that Zionism would ...”

“... 1962 Immigration Act cut the flow of immigrants from over 100,000 a year to around 70,000, but it took the shock of the 1964 Smethwick result to make Labour reduce that number to 50,000 a year after 1965. With that, the political class regarded its work as done, but the issue simmered on in the pubs and clubs until Powell’s speech of 20 April 1968. It was ...”

“... development or under-development. Ged Martin and Benjamin Kline discuss emigration and identities. John MacKenzie supplies a piece on imperial art. Finally, Marshall, followed by an Australian, an African and an Indian, offer their own, inevitably different, verdicts on Empire’s legacy. Throughout, we are reminded that British power to control events was ...”

“... screen of hysteria blots out the folded hemlocks.’ It was decades later that poets such as John Ashbery or Paul Muldoon helped Anglophone poetry to a convincing use of Surrealist licence for its own ways and meanings. In any case, at the end of the Thirties Gascoyne himself had effectively abandoned Surrealism, and with it ‘The Rites of ...”

“... believed, as Eliot did, in a fatal dissociation of English sensibility, except that for Eliot it took place in the 17th century, when Cromwell managed to ‘ruin the great work of time’, as Marvell put it, whereas for Davie it happened in the 18th century, when a sturdy but accommodating Dissent gave way to ranting Methodism and the amorphous tolerance of ...”

“... could order the fragments in her own way; but even this seems rather too programmatic, a bit too John Cage. It is certainly better to dip into the book than to read it through – one of the many endearing things about Pessoa is that he makes conscientiousness seem silly – and the fragments should be read as a series of bulletins, without assuming one ...”

“... to such early Frankfurters as Habermas’s mentors Horkheimer and Adorno, modernity’s ills took their rise from the Enlightenment, which had exalted an instrumental (or as Habermas would say, a ‘strategic’) conception of rationality. All this has now vanished: Between Facts and Norms completes Königsberg’s revenge on Frankfurt. What gives ...”

“... Fox says, ‘the spirit of the new entered Houston.’ Nearly twenty years later he designed with John Burgee the first of his giant commercial buildings, Pennzoil Place. It stands towards the edge of the Downtown cluster of corporate towers, and makes a subversive play on them by actually being two towers, only ten feet apart. Their surface is refinedly ...”

“... Parliament. Despite the undoubted drift away from Britishness over the past decade or so, the SNP took a slightly lower share of the vote than the 30.4 per cent it attained in the October 1974 general election. How do we explain the coexistence of apathy, unionism and genuine nationalist enthusiasm? During the referendum campaign Donald Dewar, the Secretary ...”

“... and tells me ideally she would vote for a bizarre dream-ticket of Bradley and Republican senator John McCain, who both advocate it. But most are straightforwardly undecided between Bradley and the other Democratic contender and favourite, Al Gore. Bradley arrives, six and a half feet tall and ramrod straight. He walks round the room, shaking hands and saying ...”

“... of that state of mind was harshly illuminated by Caitlin Thomas, adopted daughter of Augustus John and wife of Dylan, in her autobiography, Leftover Life to Kill. She was no Mimi. As promiscuous, drunk and inclined to throw furniture as her husband, she was nevertheless unable to conceive of herself as anything other than the poet’s wife. Of her ...”

“... pledged to end the ‘absurdity’ of conferring political power by heredity (a stance which it took to apply to the House of Lords but not the monarchy). The Daily Mail’s continuing outrage that the ‘Michaels’ can squat Kensington Palace for a rent that wouldn’t cover a bus shelter anywhere else in the borough (defending his lifestyle, Prince ...”

“... Adam Smith, was the theory of the marketplace of ideas. In the mouth of Justice Holmes, echoing John Stuart Mill, this became part of the jurisprudence of the First Amendment: ‘The best test of truth is the power of the thought to get itself accepted in the competition of the market.’ Holmes’s dictum is cited by Lord Steyn in a significant recent ...”

“... would turn the project into, for example, Ice T’s Comedy with illustrations by Sandow Birk, he took on the project himself with a friend, surf journalist Marcus Sanders. Their translation is into the vernacular of guy inarticulateness, with a little slang, which is to say its frequent awfulness must be intentional. Throughout most of the English-speaking ...”

“... exactly the same thing.’ In 1934, Jennings, a young artist and intellectual about town, joined John Grierson’s GPO Film Unit on a freelance basis, mainly, it seems, because he was hard up. He went on to become Britain’s most admired wartime documentary film-maker, and although his is far from a household name, his critical reputation has for decades ...”