“... had eaten into union membership and self-confidence. In late 1981 she made her move, appointing Norman Tebbit as employment secretary. Tebbit believed, as many Conservatives always have, that unions should be subservient organisations: ‘Their prime role,’ he lectured Len Murray, the general secretary of the TUC, in 1983, ‘should be to help improve the ...”

“... pages, along with such recognised poets of high accomplishment as Gavin Ewart and Henry Reed, Norman Cameron and Robert Garioch, Roy Fuller, Hamish Henderson and Sorley Maclean – and many others wholly unknown to fame. It’s true that sensitive annotation of individual experience was the hallmark of their generation of writers. Owen and Rosenberg ...”

“... loyalties are evolving should not be hustled into either-or holding pens, let alone subjected to Norman Tebbit’s cricket test. Powell’s predictions for the sizes of the immigrant and immigrant-descended population turned out to be pretty accurate. His grim predictions of race war did not. But the most immediately repellent feature of the speech is its ...”

“... He knew how to impress them. In February 1962, when Jackie Kennedy made her television tour of the White House, Capote wrote to the Deweys: Yes, I knew Jackie was doing the TV tour, and am delighted to hear it was such a success: it was very thoughtful of you to write to her, Marie. She knows all about the Dewey family – we’ve discussed you at length. She ...”

“... that I saw him in grainy photos posted by ex-pupils on Friends Reunited. Was he not the boy in the white shirt at the edge of a photograph taken in front of the school in 1980, with kids tumbling over each other and somebody spraying from a shook-up can?He tended to do well in class but on a report card for July 1978 you can see things were changing. His ...”

“... where, without conquering the proud hearts, or gaining the warm affections of the Irish, the Anglo-Norman barons, who, with mailed hearts as well as backs – neither civilising nor enriching the country – resided amongst us.’It is clear that Wilde is aware of the difficulties inherent in any effort to describe the Irish landscape with political ...”

“... spy is treated as simple fact, as is his claim that FDR’s most trusted adviser. Harry Dexter White, the founder of the IMF and the World Bank, was also working for the Kremlin. The intellectual level of the book is perhaps best illustrated by Pincher’s laborious attempt to construct a mathematical equation to explain treason. The equation, in case LRB ...”

“... took something of the same form.) Incidentally, Perry Anderson’s general matrix of the ‘White’ intellectual emigration, which suggested that the radical exiles went to America while the conservative ones – with Gellner exempted – settled in England, understates the manner in which Berlin’s Washington period was the making of him.Berlin’s ...”

“... tarmac of derelict streets. The sandpiper isn’t a creature of asphalt and paving. It’s a small white-breasted bird usually to be found foraging on British foreshores in groups of twenty or so, scuttling up and down sandy beaches as the foaming forward edge of the sea roars in and hisses back. I’d come to Grimsby to see why, after seventy years of voting ...”

“... emerging football nations as ‘a bizarre moment of African innocence’. Much has been made, via Norman Mailer’s book The Fight (1975) and Leon Gast’s documentary film When We Were Kings (1996), of President Mobutu’s self-promotion via the Rumble in the Jungle, the 1974 heavyweight title fight between George Foreman and Muhammad Ali in ...”

“... one wants to cry just thinking about him – playing tennis in newly-pressed flannels, snowy white sneakers and ‘spotless’ T-shirt, Costello is a sort of teenage Lohengrin – she reunites deserted wife with errant husband. Though Magda’s return to Smith shatters Costello – she leaves town without warning – we must assume it gives both her and ...”

“... started being driven to the Bois as well as back.’ (Similarly, his idea of dieting was drinking white wine rather than red at lunch.) On the major policy question, he took the debatable view that ‘monetary union is more likely to be the cause of economic convergence than the result of it,’ and pressed for this. But all the while he was still brooding on ...”

“... disappearing all over the city, none more shockingly than Pennsylvania Station, a McKim, Meade and White structure as imposing as the Colosseum. It disappeared the year Liebling died, and the Women’s House of Detention was demolished at last in 1974. Mitchell involved himself in many of these battles which were mostly won by ‘the god damn sons of ...”

“... and West and multicultural England is described by Jusserand as the ‘meeting of the waters’, Norman, Saxon and Dane coming together so that ‘England is now “merrie England”, bursting with life and vigour’. In Italy, according to the Fortnightly Review in 1902, the waters were meeting but failing to mingle, as if at the confluence of the Rhone and ...”

“... in the Palestinian case, a homeland for the resolution of its exile since 1948. But, as Hayden White has noted in a seminal article, ‘narrative in general, from the folk tale to the novel, from annals to the fully realised “history”, has to do with the topics of law, legality, legitimacy, or, more generally, authority.’1 Now there are numerous UN ...”