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“... an evening lecture, twisted her foot in one of those potholes for which Manhattan is famous. (‘Sue the City!’ cried the bystanders.) The foot hurt badly, and might be broken, so we took ourselves to the nearest hospital. There we were boorishly received, required to fill in forms expressing willingness to pay, and then neglected for three hours. A young ...”

“... in refining the rules about liability for negligent behaviour in determining whether you can sue a local authority which failed properly to inspect the construction of your house which is showing signs of falling down. Acts of Parliament or statutes are a much more important source of law and this brings us to Level Two of judicial operation. Statutes ...”

“... omens – the lady in the mink stole, the kind that had the heads left on it, the eyes ‘small, black, vicious beads that glared at him in outrage’, and the change in the Louisiana weather, ‘turning the crisp November air into a rank soup that smelled of hearty weeds, yellowing lawns and mutts on the loose’. The bad news comes when Burma tells Mr ...”

“... offices without appointments, leaving my book like a cuckoo laying eggs. In one office a friendly black receptionist gave me a copy of Caroline Blackwood’s account of the Duchess of Windsor and her French lawyer, Maître Blum. The girl dismissed my interest in a history of the Harlem Renaissance, repeating how much she loved the book on the Duchess. I read ...”

“... as an MP he would have been a disaster. His vision of human nature is utterly two-dimensional and black-and-white, and his political opinions are dogmatically prescriptive – with an arrogance that only the wholly immature or innocent ever dare show. His world is full of goodies and baddies. The goodies spend all their time in the ‘forefront of community ...”

“... rights, but also that they wouldn’t necessarily be respected in the streets. ‘Maybe you’ll sue them later, but in the moment they will do whatever they want,’ a veteran organiser explained. She demonstrated how the police would break a blockade, twisting the arm of the woman sitting at her feet until she let go of her neighbour’s. ‘Be nice when ...”

“... the Reich launched a counter-boycott of Jewish businesses and intensified antisemitic persecution. Black Americans who joined the Montgomery Bus Boycott in 1955-56 were harassed, arrested and beaten by state and law enforcement authorities, and scores of civil rights leaders were criminally indicted. Farm workers who participated in the Delano Grape Strike in ...”

“... Iwas​ washing up or something ten years ago when an episode of The Reunion with Sue MacGregor came on the radio, the one about the Women’s Liberation protesters who stormed the Miss World competition at the Royal Albert Hall in 1970. I must have known about it already, but it was like I’d never got the point ...”

“... On 15 December 2022, Harvard announced that Gay would become its thirtieth president, the first black person to occupy the top post in the university’s nearly 400-year history. At the end of September last year, she was inaugurated to great fanfare. A week later, on 7 October, Hamas attacked Israel, killing some 1200 people and seizing 240 hostages. On 8 ...”

“... is on the game, an alley-cat who’ll lift her chimmy for two bob (and a tanner for Mrs C). Sue has been brought up ‘by hand’ by Mrs Sucksby to be a palmer, a pogue-hoister, a dipper, a flimp: what in Borough argot they call a fingersmith. Tonight, though, she’s a mutcher – a predator on drunks. Caroline will button for Susan – lure some ...”

“... off your finger, or poking your eye out, or swallowing anything, and without them having to sue the firm. An apotheosis of all this was the notice on the hand-drier in the washroom of a crummy little bar, standing isolated along the silent road across the Nevada desert: ‘Don’t insert your head into the towel’s loop.’ But if this is a nation of ...”

“... its most publicly sensitive and creative aspect, aesthetics, there are no objective criteria. To sue a man for making an ugly thing is absurd. Why did you let him? What are drawings for? Architects are, like the barbers and unlike the surgeons, and however unwillingly, artists. Only a misunderstanding of their vocation could have led them to make the blunder ...”

“... where a person interviewed for this kind of book loses the right to withdraw his statement or sue? There must be. Otherwise, how could some of the contributors have allowed their statements to stand in all their inanity, frivolity, narcissism and callousness? (This does not go so much for the professionals ...”

“... This is where the real action happens. On one, a pneumatic (in the literal sense) keyboard in black, red, white, green and blue, the typesetter keys in the text to make corresponding perforations in a paper spool. The spool is then run into the casting machine, an amazing thing with its whirring ribbon, its bowl of slowly bubbling molten lead, its ...”

“... take the plebeian slattern or the sexless idealist and intellectual (Jude and Arabella or Sue Bridehead)? Sometimes Hardy, like Austen, surrendered to wish-fulfilment, and united the yeoman and the middle-class woman: both Under the Greenwood Tree (1872) and Far from the Madding Crowd end with the happy exhaustion of marriages. But The Woodlanders ...”