“... painted in the same year that Damien Hirst organised the Freeze exhibition and Jeff Koons created Michael Jackson and Bubbles – the year that Gorbachev announced the withdrawal of Soviet troops from Eastern Europe.For Richter, the seeming inevitability of capitalism only made it a better subject. He has never been an artist who asks questions of the world ...”

“... because they were given better rations), their preferences hardly mattered, and the occupying powers could settle the problem as they liked. In the Soviet zone that meant swift repatriation, in the West often resettlement, at least of the young, strong, ideologically attuned and easily assimilable. In 1951, the Federal Republic agreed to assume ...”

“... stories he told. Only four days after the Birmingham speech, Ann Dummett, wife of the philosopher Michael Dummett and a community relations officer in Oxford, wrote to the Times that the anecdote about the widow from Wolverhampton had been recounted to her in Oxford recently, but about an old lady in London: ‘Almost every circumstantial detail was the ...”

“... it. The deposition of Richard II was a sensitive subject. In 1599, and again in 1600, the poet Michael Drayton, in preparing fresh editions of his England’s Heroical Epistles, cautiously excised lines bearing on Richard’s uncrowning and Henry’s usurpation. The edginess surrounding the topic was largely caused by a tract of 1593-94, A Conference about ...”

“... the 1993 Prize, an actual dispute about contemporary art was staged at the Tate – defending, Michael Craig-Martin, leading light at Goldsmiths’ College; prosecuting, Hilton Kramer, editor of the New Criterion (it’s telling that there was no obvious British champion on this side). It was made a condition that the speakers should not address each ...”

“... Memoirs – had covers easily recognisable as ‘SF art’. The jackets were designed by Richard Powers, whose unmistakable paintings were usually found on Ballantine mass-market paperbacks by Isaac Asimov, Frederik Pohl, Clifford Simak and others. Powers’s designs screamed of the ‘paraliterary’, of ...”

“... however. Steve Hilton, his friend and chief strategist, is an enthusiast for the transformative powers of capitalism rather than a Conservative from the Shires; he’s also said to have voted Green in 2001. Michael Gove, another ally, is not a toff either and would fit in well at a neocon thinktank. With the help of an ...”

“... partly because of the commotion caused by the change of national leadership, the passing of Michael Oakeshott did not attract much public notice. Even the Spectator, which might have been expected to mark the event with a full salute, ignored it for half a year, before carrying a curiously distracted piece by its editor, reporting strange losses in the ...”

“... direction or another. This was the view Taylor articulated in the Fifties, now at the peak of his powers, demonstrating that he had won his own struggle for mastery of his professional vocation. ‘What happened next?’ was his favourite question: it forms the subtitle of an autobiographical essay reprinted in a useful new collection of his essays, From ...”

“... hurricanes, That waste yourselves upon the unvexed rock, Find some employment proper to your powers. ‘Always the following wind of history/Of others’ wisdom makes a buoyant air,’ Nower observes at one point. To step outside such sonorous patriarchal discourses is to come suddenly on pockets where Is nothing loud but us; where voices seem ...”

“... the serene ideal that begins to dim in Coleridge’s surrender before Wordsworth’s greater powers: In silence listening, like a devout child, My soul lay passive, by thy various strain Driven as in surges now beneath the stars, With momentary stars of my own birth, Fair constellated foam, still darting off Into the darkness; now a tranquil ...”

“... unofficial covert agents, her use of which during the miners’ strike is now widely known. So is Michael Heseltine’s shameless abuse of his secret powers over the Belgrano affair and against CND. In his case, the whistleblowers, Clive Ponting and Cathy Massiter, can be seen as representing the older, honourable ...”

“... national interests were at stake – after all, the President’s credibility was on the line. As Michael Ignatieff argues in Hard Choices, Washington was spurred to action over Bosnia, too, not by the ‘CNN factor’ itself but by the way this translated into a question of leadership: For three years, a small constituency pounded away at the shame of ...”

“... compass and tight formal constraints’ of the sonnet, could apply equally well to its own powers of compression. Rule-bound and page-limited – Simon Rae’s introduction to News that Stays News: The 20th Century in Poems compares editing an anthology to doing a crossword puzzle – the Norton’s two volumes manage to give readers ‘infinite riches ...”

“... of the emperor’s new clothes. For the handful of liberals – Lord Scarman, Anthony Lester, Michael Zander – who have been arguing for decades that we need to have our rights and the government’s powers written down and invigilated by independent judges, the Nineties are looking like the moment of truth. That they ...”