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“... sovereign state, by contrast, still commands intellectual allegiance in spite of evidence that its day is done. This is not to say that states do not continue to exist which both assert and possess the power to determine what happens inside their borders. It is to say that sovereignty no longer furnishes (if it ever did) an adequate account of the distribution ...”

“... Bang! it was autumn right on the first of the month, cool overcast after scorchers and next day it poured. He enjoys linguistic games, as in the poem on removing spiderwebs. He also has more courage than any poet since Auden in letting invention run with an idea – as when, in ‘The Cows on Killing Day’, he ...”

“... and outward-looking Scotland. Later, I set off on a tour of the unionist heartlands. It was a drab day, and the people I spoke to were unmoved by their victory. Alex Salmond’s resignation as leader of the SNP was announced on the radio. ‘For me as leader my time is nearly over,’ he said. ‘But for Scotland, the campaign continues and the dream shall ...”

“... academic reviewer suggested in these pages that one of the troubles with the Labour Party under Neil Kinnock’s leadership was that it was no longer the kind of party which attracted the loyalty and service of Oxbridge intellectuals. In his view, this was a serious flaw, perhaps even a fatal one. There is, of course, something in the charge. For all his ...”

“... the promotional material cheerfully promised, ‘if you travel by boat up the river. On a fine day, this will certainly be the most relaxed and enjoyable way of arriving.’ It was perhaps optimistic to rely on ‘good spring weather’ in London at the beginning of March. At least one delegate, having made the arduous journey east in order to speak at a ...”

“... Labour rejoiced, but prematurely: in retrospect, the fall of Heath should be ringed as a black day in the calendar. In 1975 he was replaced as leader of the Tory Party by Mrs Thatcher, a far more deadly enemy of the Left. Meanwhile, Labour Cabinets were lashed to the wheel with nowhere to go except straight into the eye of the storm. The tasks of deflating ...”

“... spring leaks. Erwin Schrödinger, the renowned physicist, rubs his sore eyes, sight deteriorating day by day, and contemplates the boggy hinterland of his private life, while the mathematical breakthrough he seeks swims further away from his tentative reach. By the outbreak of war, Schrödinger had been a peripatetic ...”

“... box makes a sort of running auto-adjudication on the performance of the journal of record. On one day, there is a matter of spelling or nomenclature set right. On another, a date or a place. Occasionally, the correction goes so far as to specify what the paper might, or even should, have said. Some see, in this parade of scruple and objectivity, a Victorian ...”

“... note, with a tinge of envy, the degree of political support enjoyed by Margaret Thatcher, with Neil Kinnock and Gerald Kaufman endorsing her every move. In normal times issues of international law are seen as a recondite speciality: in moments of stress they turn out to be of crucial importance. In 1956 the British knew from the very beginning that they ...”

“... John Berger, who writes: I live in France. I take this book everywhere with me. And almost every day I find myself opening it to translate a poem to somebody after a discussion or a joke or a conversation. Maybe to a Polish building worker, maybe to two lovers, or a grandmother or a peasant or a teacher. I make crude translations, but afterwards I hear a ...”

“... labour are found to be more flexible. The slaughterhouse chapters describe the events of a single day, and set out to evoke the brutality and monotony of the work through a fractured, modernistic style which spares the reader nothing of the horror of ‘the cow-demolition process’. One of the strongest scenes in the novel has Ambrosio staggering out of the ...”

“... lost his seat on Labour’s Executive Committee and internal party management will be the least of Neil Kinnock’s worries this side of Polling Day. There is an irony in all this. Livingstone’s argument about the 1987 General Election is that Labour ran a very professional campaign, but with a message that was already ...”

“... unison’: ‘We won’t go, we won’t be separated.’ The press dearly loves a twin, and Neil Lyndon did a good piece on the harassment for the Sunday Times, in which he let us know that the lorry-driver was no oil-painting. This strange story can’t have escaped the sharp eye of Bruce Chatwin, who is an expert on strange places and strange people ...”

“... was always the aim. In 1969 he photographed the images on his black and white television as Neil Armstrong and Buzz Aldrin walked on the moon. Motion in space is always slow motion, so a photographer looking on had more time to think about the action, such as it was. ‘Always been interested in astronomy and planets,’ says Eagar. ‘I devour the Nasa ...”

“... has emerged, which threatens to bar our family’s return to its amnesiac state. Michael Collins, Neil Jordan’s film, is not about us as a family, but we are part of its revolutionary story and provide much of its romance. In May 1917, Michael Collins came down for a few days to Longford, one of those anonymous midland counties that tourists in Ireland pass ...”