“... at the same priority level as socks. I heard that soldiers were buying their own flak jackets with steel ‘trauma’ plates, Camelbak water pouches, ballistic goggles, knee and elbow pads, drop pouches to hold ammunition magazines, and load-bearing vests. I heard they were rigging their vehicles with pieces of scrap metal as protection against roadside ...”

“... I visited Boston, in late 2021, the finished barrier was less than a year old. A semi-cylindrical steel gate weighing several hundred tonnes now lies on its side on the riverbed, ready to be rotated by hydraulic rams to block the flow of water and seal off the gap in the town’s defences. Adam Robinson, the Environment Agency engineer responsible for ...”

“... words of Nick Cohen. The best introduction to the history of British Trotskyism is a pamphlet by John Sullivan, a former member of the International Socialists, called Go Fourth and Multiply/When this Pub Closes – that’s ‘fourth’ as in Fourth International.2 Sullivan, who died in 2003, wrote these notes in the 1980s as an affectionate but critical ...”

“... this e-meter allows auditors to ‘see a thought’. I don’t want​ to be ‘audited’ by John Travolta, or any other policeman of the soul. And as I shuffle towards the immigration desk after the plane has landed, I don’t feel grateful for the final act of examination that awaits me, with all its sophisticated accoutrements of ‘social ...”

“... we were all such boys.’ This is how I remember my early days working for the BBC in the 1960s. John Fortune, John Bird, Keith Waterhouse and Willis Hall: we were all such boys too and it seemed such play. Less play was Beyond the Fringe, but that had its sillier side. Dudley Moore had an act – never, I think, done in ...”

“... have cruised down the Lea Valley from Lippitt’s Hill Camp at High Beach, a base right beside John Clare’s Epping Forest asylum, and they’ll be back again tomorrow. Sukhdev Sandhu, who flew with the sky cops for his book Night Haunts, called the experience ‘the panoptic sublime’. The machines cost half a million pounds each, a sum that pays for a ...”

“... Slater and Maya Slater, prompts us to ask again: ‘What is Tourguéneffish?’ Edmund Wilson, John Bayley and others have made the point that Turgenev in the original is more ‘textured’, modulated and idiomatic (‘He is interested in words,’ Wilson wrote, ‘in a way that the other great 19th-century Russian novelists – with the exception of ...”

“... us as a Jewish state?’ Barak writes in his memoir. ‘Your rhetoric suggests you have spines of steel,’ he says he told Netanyahu. ‘But your behaviour is living proof of the old saying that it’s easier to take the Jews out of the galut’ – the diaspora – ‘than to take the galut out of the Jews.’ In Barak’s view, Netanyahu sounded not so ...”

“... of a revolutionary dreamer. As the mainstream right talked warily of selling off parts of the steel industry, Littlechild jumped ahead to what few others imagined could be the future: to the privatisation of the railways and the Post Office. ‘What the Post Office needs,’ he wrote, ‘is an imaginative asset stripper.’ His most extreme ideas, by the ...”

“... a measly $277,000. Its origins date back to the first stage of integration: the European Coal and Steel Community (ECSC) born of the Schuman Plan was endowed with a Court of Justice that was rolled forward into the European Economic Community set up by the Treaty of Rome five years later, and then into the European Union created at Maastricht.Thanks to the ...”

“... their profit-eyed, zoned-out heroes.Prince​ was born on 7 June 1958 in Minneapolis. His father, John L. Nelson, was 42 at the time; his mother, Mattie Shaw, was 25. His first name was the one his father performed under in a local jazz combo: Prince Rogers. During Prince’s teenage years it was a volatile household. Listening to ‘When Doves Cry’ is like ...”

“... won admirers among the black writers who emerged during the Black Power era, such as LeRoi Jones, John A. Williams and Ishmael Reed. And his legacy now? As Jackson writes, ‘history has borne out some of his vinegary judgments.’ Today, Himes’s belief in the implacable force of white supremacism – what is now called Afro-pessimism – enjoys a growing ...”

“... for the most burglaries in England. The British Epilepsy Association is offices only but has a steel door, having been broken into three times, one of them a ram-raid; so, coming away, I’m perhaps more conscious of vandalism and urban decay than I otherwise might be. The result is, when I see a starved-looking boy of ten and his sister, twelve or ...”

“... in the North, campaigned against Britain joining the EEC at the 1975 referendum. His successor, John Ryman, later jailed for (non-political) fraud, also disdained the Common Market. He called Helmut Schmidt a ‘patronising Hun’. Ronnie Campbell was a die-hard Lexiter; his Tory successor, Ian Levy, rode to victory on Brexit. The figures from the 1975 ...”

“... of Moscow and the dominion of the world. Americans are readily alarmed, sometimes even panicked. John Foster Dulles, who worked for Truman and then became Secretary of State to Eisenhower, with a single-mindedness matching Mao’s lashed together a ring-fence around China, designed to contain the eastern end of the presumed Sino-Soviet monolith as Nato ...”