“... credibly, and often fall prey to wishful thinking; truly persuasive large-scale accounts are rare (Christopher Chitty’s Sexual Hegemony, posthumously published in 2020, is a bold but sketchy attempt). Queer studies, in particular, can be pulled between the desire to accord marginal sexualities proper recognition and attention, and the political intuition ...”

“... as ‘So long as there are people in the world who have no power whatsoever, I cannot lose all hope,’ and ‘I have never heard of a person attacking power without wanting it.’ Portraits of the powerful in history rekindle his hatred of power, ‘and warn me of my own power over people.’ Everything Canetti writes is obsessed with and transformed by ...”

“... to the Conference were besieging Abacha even before he finished stating the terms – in the hope of a juicy government contract that would make them millionaires. This is to say nothing of those – like Kingibe, the Chief’s running mate – who didn’t need to be asked twice before agreeing to join the Conference, thus enabling Abacha to maintain ...”

“... This is surely the plain biographical truth, well stated. But if both the emergency and the hope that brought him into the Communist movement were more intense than was typical of his English contemporaries, it is less clear that the chronological contrast would have been more significant than the geographical, as he goes on to suggest. Was the October ...”

“... of Kelley’s release, and none of them mentions anything about an escape or injury. In July 1593, Christopher Parkins reports from Prague that Kelley has been promised ‘his enlargement presently’, but still ‘remains in hold’ at Krivoklat. According to Dee’s diary he was released on 4 October, but the best source puts the date a couple of days ...”

“... Hague, Duncan Smith and Howard – who were sworn opponents of Maastricht, none with any hope of winning an election. In government, Blair’s initial doubts about the single currency, prompted by the hostility to the euro of the Murdoch press that had helped elect him, soon faded. But Gordon Brown’s firm refusal to abandon sterling, made from his ...”

“... dimmed by the circumstances of his incarceration. I’m not suggesting we shouldn’t look in hope for the places where creative survival might be found. It’s just that I doubt this gets us closer to the man himself.Some of the writing on the drawings is, as Adamson put it, esoteric. One drawing, done in the art studio on a large sheet of paper (and ...”

“... world and constantly execrated but never actually discussed. An exception is a little speech by St Christopher, the AA name of one of the alcoholics put in charge of Mungo, who makes a link with the upper classes, not an unusual suggestion in itself, but the angle is new:Well, they’re aw at it. It’s what us boys do when we’re alone. A bit of ...”

“... against Forth Valley Health Board, but that hadn’t happened either. The best the families could hope for, they were told, was a Crown Censure – effectively a ticking off.The Allans began to gather their own data. Alone at first, and then in collaboration with researchers at Glasgow University, they trawled through the records of hundreds of ...”

“... of the art world’, the letter was signed by Marina Warner, Michael Craig-Martin, Christopher Frayling and George Melly, also several artists and dealers, and as with all round-robins it wasn’t perhaps the letter any one of them would have written individually. Still, as a tactic, it showed blessed unworldliness, as surprising as it is ...”

“... blindly to power and authority’.This will not do. They were ‘ordinary men’ – the title of Christopher Browning’s indispensable book – who shot, day after day, at close range, men, women and children by the hundreds of thousands. The social psychology of the past three decades seems to belie the notion that a deviant personality is necessary to ...”

“... one so far – well over two million words, and much more to come. Counsel assisting the Inquiry, Christopher Clarke QC, acting as a kind of master of ceremonies, opened the proceedings by saying that everyone present had read my various witness statements (and, later, Derek Humphry’s) and that he and other counsel representing interested parties had some ...”

“... when they invoked his right to publish a book that could elicit a plausible charge of blasphemy. Christopher Hitchens spoke early and courageously on those lines. ‘Behind the use of bleating words like “offensive”,’ he wrote in his Nation column on 13 March 1989, ‘one can sense abject trahison: the ecumenicism of the philistines’; as for ...”

“... table between John Standing, playing Nicholas Jenkins, and Jeremy Clyde, playing Roddie Cutts. Christopher Morahan wants our table to be having an animated and amusing conversation, with Sillery the life and soul of the party. There is one problem with this and that is that the MPs are played by London extras, a notoriously difficult, unco-operative ...”

“... to be a family. Marten weighed the certainty that her baby would be taken into care against her hope that they might somehow find a way to stay together. Once that decision had been made, rationality, the capacity to compare one set of possible outcomes to another, disappeared. They behaved like people in the grip of a desperate compulsion. This must have ...”