“... as if the word ‘economic’ was ‘economical’: if so, Londoners are still paying a high price for the error. The 1875 Public Health Act conferred a power to lay water mains on local authorities which supplied water – something they could not do unless they had first laid water mains. The courts cured this by deciding the Act meant what Parliament ...”

“... absorbing the trade surpluses of Europe and China – and that the American working class pays the price. But they didn’t discuss the power that accrues to the US through its financial dominance. Economic sanctions were treated in a single line: ‘The dollar’s role in the global payments system has given the Treasury immense power to impose financial ...”

“... them with my fellow men.Mostly, however, he compels our attention as an eloquent villain who, like Richard III, surpasses our expectations in the extravagance of his misdeeds and has the wit to mock himself as he does so. Maldoror claims to be as bad as bad can be. He equates himself with the female shark which, after a shipwreck whose possible survivors he ...”

“... a US congressional aide, submitted a sworn deposition to the court in which she claimed that Richard Fuisz, a CIA agent, had given her a guarantee that he knew who was behind the Lockerbie bombing. Lindauer’s affidavit describes a conversation in Fuisz’s ‘business office’ in Chantilly, Virginia, in which he said he knew for sure the perpetrators ...”

“... we hear the first chords of Bill Haley and the Comets. We find, too, the trenchant comments of Richard Hoggart, A.H. Halsey, Anthony Sampson and Michael Young – the Four Evangelists of the 1950s to whom Hennessy dedicates his book. Their increasingly grumpy pronouncements on the ‘shiny barbarism of the new affluence’ pepper the pages of Having It So ...”

“... But her very existence, in its unapologetic vitality, was enough to provoke. The graphic designer Richard Hollis, a contemporary at Wimbledon, found her ‘over-lush, you could say. I don’t know if you’d call it pushy.’ Of her work he says: ‘It’s direct, energetic, and I think that’s how she was … Her work looks quite confident, which is what ...”

“... and impartially admire all schools of art.’ So he or she will congratulate – and if the price is really high, thank – the successful bidder. My favourite memory of what can be a fraught business came when I was bidding online for some photographs in a provincial French auction. At the moment I saw off the (very few) rival bidders, the auctioneer ...”

“... designed for use, and many of its books were secular. They attracted readers and disruption. Richard de Bury, an English bibliophile who knew the Sorbonne collection well, warned librarians to keep students away from their books, since they ate cheese while they read and dribbled fragments onto the page. Yet despite such menaces – as well as the worse ...”

“... William Blackburn (whose creative writing programme taught and mentored Styron, Reynolds Price, Mac Hyman, Fred Chappell and Anne Tyler), show a commendable respect, seriousness, idealism and work ethic. Right at the start he zeroed in on his weakness as a writer, his over-reliance on rhetorical trumpets, and even in the acutely self-conscious larval ...”

“... American taxpayer is paying now almost 200 billion dollars . . . And we’re paying the highest price in the loss of the lives of our young soldiers – almost alone. I’m John Kerry and I approved this message. In a world of instant projections and medium-is-the-message contemplations, commentary on the presidential race of 2004 might finish right ...”

“... acquittal even of hardened and violent criminals whose liberty puts innocent people at risk is a price which society ought to be prepared to pay to ensure that no defendant is convicted if the defence can sustain an imputation of witness unreliability, police misconduct, prosecution carelessness, or judicial bias. To the ideologists of ‘crime ...”

“... perhaps a little ambitious even for Burke. In April 1758, shortly after the birth of his son Richard, he agreed to compile and edit a new periodical to be called the Annual Register in return for a fee of £100 a year. A second son, Christopher, was born in December 1758 and it soon became apparent that Burke’s literary earnings would not suffice to ...”

“... apparent eagerness to wage nuclear war. Their campaign had a considerable impact, and when Richard Nixon got to the White House four years later he was convinced that scientists were a dangerously anti-Republican political lobby. Nixon shut down the Office of Science and Technology, and kicked the presidential science adviser out of the cabinet – an ...”

“... depends on a successful resolution of two sets of questions. The first seems to be formulated by Richard Titmuss in The Gift Relationship: From Human Blood to Social Policy. Titmuss draws a distinction between Britain, where all fresh blood donation was voluntary, a gift to the community and hence an expression of concern with the general good; and the ...”

“... a quotation labouring to attain a modicum of reality. Not so much a dry David Hockney splash as Richard Wilson’s site-specific installation 20:50: his tank of sump oil, miraculously transubstantiated into this brilliant new substance, a liquid thicker than jelly but lighter than air. A seductive mosaic carpet across which you cannot walk without ...”