“... 1906 to Russian parents in Ukraine, he witnessed revolution, civil war and famine as a child. The steel town of Kamenskoye, where he spent his childhood, changed hands between Red and Whites several times. His family – skilled working class, not badly off, able to afford nice Sunday suits for the children – briefly retreated to Kursk, in Russia, where ...”

“... and in 1945 the party’s intention to take coal, gas, electricity, the railways, and iron and steel into public ownership was explicitly declared. Nationalisation continued to be a contentious issue throughout most of the period of the Attlee government. But its importance was rhetorically magnified by left and right alike. On the left, the illusion that ...”

“... jewellery, and a six inch long marlin hook dangling around my neck on a length of heavy stainless steel chain. I decorated the set by draping my black leather biker jacket over my chair at the panellists’ table. The jacket had handcuffs on the left shoulder, rainbow freedom rings on the right side lacings, and Queer Nation-style stickers reading SEX ...”

“... into action wearing a cap modified to droop around his ears (he declined to wear a British-style steel helmet), a thick turtleneck sweater, highly polished cavalry boots and, draped around his neck, a seven-foot puce muffler knitted by his mother. He refused to use a gas-mask and was twice lightly gassed, earning two of his 20 citations for wounds and ...”

“... Europe with low-hanging fog and assassinations, and were grateful to be sealed behind glass and steel in ‘a sort of tinned Occident’, as Vesna Goldsworthy put it. There were Easterners, too, who shared this uneasy view; Easterners who never thought of themselves as Easterners, such as my grandmother, Elena, whose horizon was filled with the West, with ...”

“... public figures who fell from grace: Richard Nixon, his former special counsel Charles Colson, and John Newton, the Anglican hymn-writer who once captained slave ships. Nazarbayev’s life story doesn’t have this trajectory. It is 19 years since he became his republic’s leader and his rise has not yet crested. You could say that by accepting the Kazakh ...”

“... Membership is much more common in economically fragile regions such as the North-East – the steel plant in Redcar that was threatened with closure last month is heavily unionised – than in the ever more dominant South-East. Even without the headwinds of the current trade union bill, most unions are at best running to stand still. Prentis told ...”

“... on the Democrats for congressional support. Elite leadership of the Republican Party collapsed. John McCain chose the shockingly unqualified Sarah Palin as a running mate in the 2008 election because she was hugely popular with the Republican base, who revelled in the outrage she triggered among liberals. Barack Obama’s victory in that election only ...”

“... women’s prison near Perugia where Knox was incarcerated for almost four years. Her cell had a ‘steel bed frame painted pumpkin orange, a green foam mattress and a coarse wool blanket’. The doors were ‘unlike any I had ever seen: they were solid sheets of metal with no handles, just a hole where the handle should be.’ When prisoners were sent books ...”

“... counterparts. Striking oil deals in Lagos, Tehran and Caracas, they scour the globe for iron ore, steel, copper and timber. China and India also increasingly rank among the world’s largest producers of carbon emissions. In both countries, the newly enriched have similar aspirations. The wealthy farmer’s house I visited in a tea-growing village in Zhejiang ...”

“... Paracelsus: Ills from without extrinsic Balms may heal, Oft cur’d and wounded by the self-same Steel – But us what remedy can heal or cure, Whose very nature is our worst disease. This epigram is not improved by its failure to rhyme in the third and fourth lines. (‘You might have rhymed,’ as Horatio says to Hamlet. Coleridge, a natural rhymer, is ...”

“... Hyacinth’s bookishness, his soul and his soft feeling, have been lured into the orbit of cold steel and hard strategy. The novel’s energy is released when these opposites cease to move against each other, or cease even to run in tandem, but merge, to become aspects of a single burning emotion.In a letter to his old Boston friend Grace Norton the year he ...”

“... does not treat the actual life of Welles or its salient circumstances: his collaborations with John Houseman and Joseph Cotten and Michéal Mac Liammóir; his affairs with Dolores Del Rio and Lena Horne, and his marriage to Rita Hayworth; complicated relationships, usually rounded up to some sort of friendship, with the great producers of the day who used ...”

“... that will become the final section of the novel, ‘On Death and the Dead’. In it, he quotes John the Divine: ‘They shall seek death, he wrote, and death shall flee from them. I believe “those days” to be near. I believe “them” to be us. But if it is the case that death one day will be gone, what then of the already dead?’ Where does our ...”

“... because he has run out of animal comparisons. It took a while for this manner to change. King John, a bit later, has some intensities of a sort not to be found in its predecessors, but it remembers the old redundancies. Here Salisbury is protesting against the King’s decision to be crowned a second time: Therefore, to be possess’d with double ...”