“... 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 ...”

“... illiberal, openly racist state, led by a close ally of Donald Trump, is impossible to stomach. As Peter Beinart wrote in 2010, the Jewish establishment asked American Jews to ‘check their liberalism at Zionism’s door’, only to find that ‘many young Jews had checked their Zionism instead.’The conflict that Beinart described is an old one. In ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... arrests and all-round discomforts that made life for everyone extremely hard. While we were there Peter Hansen, the Danish commissioner-general of the United Nations Relief and Works Agency (UNRWA), the main aid organisation serving Palestinians, spoke out strongly about the dangers – including starvation – of Israeli policies in the West Bank and ...”

“... slowly become clear. The revelations of the Grenfell inquiry, so plainly and painfully recorded by Peter Apps of Inside Housing, are echoed not just in thousands of other cases of ghastly what-might-have-beens but in the lackadaisical, flailing process of undoing what was done.* The inquiry revealed a tangle of deniability masquerading as responsibility, with ...”

“... hair: ‘fairly long, covered the ears, straight hair’. He added: ‘It was very light brown in colour. After he had been running it was messed and fell to the sides of the man’s face.’ No description of the facial features was given to the policeman. Brooks said that he was not sure that he could identify the man again. Afterwards, Brooks saw ...”

“... an enduring (quasi-)Marxist current in British gay activism, represented by both Jeffrey Weeks and Peter Tatchell, has viewed ‘homosexuals’ as an oppressed class, like the proletariat, produced, along with housewives, by a historically contingent bourgeois sexual system which emerged alongside modern capitalism/consumerism in the 19th century. Its focus is ...”

“... its way to the library of Cornell University; quotations from it appear in John Wyse Jackson and Peter Costello’s 1997 biography of John Stanislaus. On 26 and 27 and 28 May, Charlie Joyce noted that his father was drunk, and again on 31 May and 1 and 2 and 13 and 14 and 15 June. And on Sunday 24 June: ‘Pappie home to dinner very drunk: shouting, swearing ...”

“... the commander of the US forces, accosted his British counterpart, General de la Billière: ‘Hey Peter, what sort of country have you got there when they sack the prime minister halfway through a war?’It was not a coup, not even a very British one. But it was, as Charles Moore describes, the result of a very Tory conspiracy. Thatcher fell following the ...”

“... but when the poem was published these nationals and this nation were gone, and the poem, Terence Brown says, ‘seemed to bear more on Irish affairs than on the general European crisis’. But of course the poem was never not about Irish affairs, and this is where the question of reference needs some thought. We can go several ways on this matter. Paul ...”

“... on. This was just one of the domestic surprises that came in the wake of 11 September. Another was Peter Mandelson’s strangely off-key suggestion that the secret services should be recruiting in Bradford rather than St James’s (apparently on the grounds that immigrants would find it easier than Old Etonians to disguise themselves as Islamic ...”

“... has taken the opportunity to talk openly about the worrying thoughts in our heads as we drain the brown fluid from the meat in a polystyrene punnet. Obesity, heart disease, animal welfare, greenhouse gases, the nagging intimation that we can’t go on as we have without parts of the food chain shearing away: Defra grasps that our misgivings, like our ...”

“... was a desperate State Department – with John Negroponte as the ghoulish go-between and Gordon Brown as the blushing bridesmaid – fearful that if it did not push this through both parties might soon be too old for recycling. The bride was certainly in a hurry, the groom less so. Brokers from both sides engaged in lengthy negotiations on the size of the ...”

“... many of them privatised – are what I see. On the far side of Roman Road are the barracks-style brown brick walkways of the Greenways estate, built in the 1950s, solid and unremarkable, renovated not long ago, providing homes for hundreds; beyond them, its crown poking up beyond the Greenways roof, is Denys Lasdun’s listed Sulkin House, built on the site ...”