“... ticket booth – a fat and somewhat sinister personage with homemade tattoos, pockmarks and huge brown bloodshot eyes – has instructed us to pay her.It is with some relief that I spot my mother still under the tree. Alone in her wheelchair she looks vulnerable and dignified. It’s starting to hit me that she really can’t walk any more. That her vision ...”

“... was the subject of intermittent campaigns. In his 1964 study, The Last Refuge, the sociologist Peter Townsend stressed the frequent affronts to dignity and the lack of privacy and basic sanitary standards afforded to older people. He reserved special contempt for the former workhouses, where inmates wore institutional clothing (sometimes bearing the names ...”

“... him, Zuckerberg insists that online connection is a perfect substitute for human contact.Here’s Peter Thiel, founder of PayPal, who put $10 million into the lawsuit that in 2016 bankrupted Gawker, which had outed him as gay. This might make you think he cared about privacy, but he also founded Palantir, which surveils immigrants for the Department of ...”

“... a new idea and a new faith.’ Whether Harold Nicolson, inviting Osbert Sitwell, Raymond Mortimer, Peter Quennell and Alan Pryce-Jones to contribute to its pages, saw the ‘new faith’ in the same light as Mosley isn’t quite clear. ‘Week by week,’ Mosley exclaimed on the front page, ‘we shall put before you new vistas into the future. Week by ...”

“... trumpet above the chancel arch, the dead rising from their tombs in their shrouds; on the left St Peter welcomed the saved into what seemed a rather overcrowded heavenly city; on the right crowned and mitred souls were being dragged in chains to the mouth of hell. On the south wall the archangel Gabriel was weighing a soul in a huge pair of scales; a devil ...”

“... Asians who, like me, grew up in areas of England such as Horsham or Cheam or Gloucester, where brown faces were scarce became increasingly embarrassed by our parents’ accents, by their insistence that we wear outdated polyester clothes and drench our hair in coconut oil before going out. It was easy to forget the love and care that made them do this. We ...”

“... tenants. The Gregory clause was ‘a charter for land clearance and consolidation’, according to Peter Gray. ‘The substantial rise in evictions after 1847 was attributed largely to its introduction,’ according to Christine Kinealy. For the tenants whose potato crop had failed and whose families were starving, the Gregory clause was a nightmare. As a ...”

“... about the constitution, but to worry more generally about the democratic adequacy of humanity’ (Peter Sloterdijk). ‘Brexit shows that the Brussels bureaucracy, that alleged monster that employs no more civil servants than a central German city administration, has done a great job. The extent of interconnectedness at all levels has to be ...”

“... check) and a gorgeous pale tweed sports jacket, dotted with tiny delicate flecks of brown and black. He held his alto gently in the crook of one arm. He smiled faintly at me – a low-rent Lucifer – and was humming quietly. You’d be so – o – o – o – nice – to come home to! He reminded me at once of those hunky young hard-drinking ...”

“... was broached – something her ladyship could hardly be expected to understand. But if the muddy brown liquid that hiccuped from the spigot would not serve the recalcitrant denizens of the hall, it might do for the help.Early in 1966, when I was 23 years old – married, with a baby, and a graduate student at Cambridge – my wife and I, tired of ...”

“... down the dark corridors of the Hotel Intercontinental in Kabul, trying to keep up with him and Ben Brown and Mark Urban from the BBC, who have longer legs than me. I remember him being very interested in television and not very interested in newspapers. Richard speaks well of him, though. Paul and I consolidate our cars. Now we have just one between us, a red ...”

“... the muscles and always arouses suspicion, are here personally reduced to the self-effacing Mr Brown then replaced by the faceless banana company, which brings with it capitalism, modernity, union-busting, bloody repression and an inevitable relocation (an uncanny anticipation of the US’s own plague of factory expatriation decades later). It also brings ...”

“... bells had not been evacuated from St Catherine, St John, St Brigit, Saints Barbara, Elizabeth, Peter and Paul, from Trinity to Corpus Christi, melted in their belfries and dripped away without pomp or ceremony. In the Big Mill red wheat was milled. Butcher Street smelled of burnt Sunday roast. The Municipal Theatre was giving a premiere, a one-act play ...”

“... promise of redemptive violence. Some have applied similar thinking to today’s far right: Wendy Brown identified ‘apocalyptic populists’ as a key component of Trump’s voter base in 2016, and her more recent work examines the mood of nihilism pervading contemporary political life.†For Seymour, the key emotion of our time is resentment, fuelled by the ...”