“... the French seemed largely unreceptive. Two or three years later, they finally caught on. The young man who had lost ten thousand francs organising the first (lacklustre) rave in Lyon launched a series of techno compilation CDs. The first sold over 150,000 copies.Ecstasy was common in gay clubs in New York in the 1980s but its use didn’t become ...”

“... wrote. Stravinsky of course remained immune – but that’s another story. The first volume of David Nice’s Prokofiev biography stops when the 44-year-old composer settles in Moscow with his Spanish wife, Lina, and two young sons at the end of 1935. But it describes in detail the eight preceding years, during which ...”

“... used. The second in a series of ‘Critical Bibliographies in Modern History’ (the first, by David Nicholls, covers the 19th century), it is a handbook for ‘school-teachers, lecturers and students’ who ‘clearly need guidance about what has been coming out, and about whether some beloved work has stood the test of time’. John Morrill has ...”

“... substantial biographies of Jane Austen within a decade smacks of excess. But, compared with Lord David Cecil’s A Portrait of Jane Austen (1979) and John Halperin’s The Life of Jane Austen (1984), the work under review is in so many ways the best that it deserves to make its mark. The three authors, moreover, approach their subject (or subjects) from ...”

“... in the company of a boy, smaller and younger than ourselves, a fragile boy with ginger hair called David. I think we thought of him as ‘our boy’. We bossed him. Occasionally, when he didn’t walk straight or carry our bags or speak when we wanted him to, we’d slap him or hit his hands with a ruler. We had to pass through fields to get to school, with ...”

“... of it), refuelled by access to new material and a reduced fear of libel. Of the seven children of David and Sydney, Lord and Lady Redesdale, six were girls; the Mitford industry revolves, lighthouse-like, between them. Nancy, the novelist, wit and Bright Young Thing, comes to prominence whenever her books are ...”

“... absurdity, it bears the stamp of an adult mind. Can we really suppose that a child of seven, too young to write out the play for herself, who had to depend on her aunt as copyist, was capable not just of composing such a work but of composing it in her head? If ‘Grandison’ was written later than 1800, when Anna might have been old enough to conceive the ...”

“... on fire. The influence that Morecambe and Wise have exerted is pervasive but unspecific. Many young British comedians and comedy writers cite them as influences – if only because Morecambe and Wise were part of the comic furniture of the homes they grew up in. What modern comedy might hope to learn from them is the warmth of the relationship that they ...”

“... it was in this immediate context that the Survey of London was born. In 1894, C.R. Ashbee, a young East End architect, with a passionate interest in the Arts and Crafts Movement, was so outraged by the demolition of the Old Palace at Bromley-le-Bow that he set up a Committee for the Survey of London Monuments, which planned to publish lists of all ...”

“... of the Marxist assumptions which were spreading through the South Wales coalfield when he was a young man. Even in later life he continued to use Marxist categories when he turned from day-to-day politics to philosophical system-building. But whatever else he was, Bevan was not a systematic thinker. In practice, his Marxism amounted to little more than a ...”

“... two-party politics now has to accommodate. The UK electorate is split between the old and the young, the educated and the less educated, the metropolitan and the provincial, the urban and the rural. The two main parties increasingly resemble loose coalitions of different interest and identity groups, each with its own axe to grind, and primarily united by ...”

“... unseen cameraman who’d followed my public career. Since apparently I could do no wrong with this young lady … Losing your virginity to a woman who has already constructed a shrine in your honour: what could be more transcendentally egotistical than that? Schmitt says that one of the characteristics of political romantics is that they lack a gift for real ...”

“... David Keenan’s​ first novel, This Is Memorial Device: An Hallucinated Oral History of the Post-Punk Scene in Airdrie, Coatbridge and Environs 1978-86 (2017), documents the rise and fall of a fictitious (though awesomely real) band called Memorial Device. Its members are from Keenan’s home town of Airdrie – about thirteen miles east of Glasgow – and the book takes the form of 26 testimonies from band members, friends, jilted lovers, relatives, hangers-on and rival acts ...”

“... her daughter.’ But this preference had to be reciprocated. One day, when my sister was very young, our mother asked her whom she loved best, Mummy or Daddy. My sister did in fact love Mummy best but, being of an angelic disposition, lied diplomatically: ‘I love you both the same.’ Mummy didn’t speak to her for days.Not speaking to people for days ...”

“... the abominable to the merely unsavoury.In the case of Holocaust denial – the crime for which David Irving was sentenced to three years in prison and banned from returning to Austria – the fear of contagion in some countries is based on rational horror instructed by recent experience. That is the argument for making an exception to the belief that the ...”