“... a place to test our personal limits – how tough, how callous, how crazy we could be.’ A group of ‘good boys’ (he insists), barely out of college, goes wild. Furer became a sadist. Without anything ever being stated, he feels that was what was expected. But no one wants to admit to it; no one wants to see (it was only with great difficulty that ...”

“... Mr Bengu’s job is such a bed of nails is that under apartheid each homeland and each racial group had its own education department. In addition, white education was split between several departments. The result is that Bengu has the difficult, longwinded and expensive job of amalgamating 19 different education departments into one. In only slightly ...”

“... earlier: for young socialist economists like Durbin, Gaitskell, Meade and Jay. Because of their group discussions Labour in 1945 ‘was intellectually prepared for the economic realities of power in a way inconceivable at any earlier time in its history’. If Morgan provides ample ingredients for Labour’s self-examination, how far does he guide the Party ...”

“... in terms like those used by the narrator of Whatever when he recounts a last chat with a friend in crisis: ‘He said to me: “See you soon.” I don’t believe it for a moment. I get the feeling we’ll never see each other again.’ The derelictions of parents are a source of more lasting trauma. Houellebecq has rarely seemed an angrier writer than when ...”

“... that have damaged him and us in Europe, such as moving the Conservatives out of the centre-right group in the European Parliament (hence the discreet support for Brown on the part of Merkel and Sarkozy) – but without much effect. Nonetheless, although he has made concessions to the Lib Dems on taxation, the Queen’s Speech included most of what the Tory ...”

“... was like some fraction to which everything had to be reduced.’H.D. can seem a kind of Zelig of international modernism: she knew or met almost everyone, cut a strikingly beautiful figure, became Exhibit A for Imagism. In The Man Who Died, D. H. Lawrence figured her as the Priestess of Isis. Follow as she travels to Greece on a boat with Havelock ...”

“... Few were surprised when it was trounced at the polls in 2010.Three years​ before the financial crisis, David Cameron had been elected to lead the Conservatives, promising to make them a more appealing alternative to Labour after the serial fiascos of his predecessors. Unlike them, he was not a Eurosceptic and made sure he got into office without damaging ...”

“... Thein Sein had been his loyal sidekick, the blinking and bespectacled face of the regime at such international gatherings as it was permitted to attend. Like most of his new ministers, he was a general who had only recently stepped out of uniform. Nothing happened in the early months of his notionally civilian government to dispel the sense of ...”

“... whole is to be more than the sum of its parts, and if a region is not to become home to a random group of firms. Models of the kind advocated by Porter have proved successful around the world. Perhaps the most famous example is the Japanese policy of building technopolises, cities linking academia, industry and the public sector, radiating outwards from ...”

“... radical right-wing politics. His father died; then so did Nansen: it was time to act on his own. A group of friends with money agreed to help launch a new national unification movement, with him at the helm. He was remarkably successful to start with, but in May 1931, before the new party had had a chance to contest elections, Quisling was appointed Defence ...”

“... and had been trying to prove it using experiments that involved feeding the dolphins LSD. The group was so impressed with Lilly’s presentation, which promised a more proactive approach to the problem than scanning space for signals, that they called themselves the ‘Order of the Dolphin’ (perhaps Lilly had brought his stash with him). Dolphins are ...”

“... time, and that genetically programmed mouse, and lots of crazy Mormons, and the Islamic terrorist group with the silly acronym (KEVIN). But Smith’s comic talents burned away these breathy complications, so that they seemed mere hysterical wisps alongside the sunny central story, masterfully controlled, of the delightful Jones and Iqbal families. The ...”

“... schoolchild’ in Weimar Germany might have discerned that Barth’s ‘spiritual language of crisis’ was ‘suited to the political situation’. The German Jewish philosopher Ernst Bloch, who embraced the Russian Revolution and eventually lived by choice in East Germany, represents for Lilla the Bolshevik variation on the theme. Barth ‘helped to ...”

“... can expect to gain from it. In Kenya, Wrong claims, it was generally accepted that the ruling group – the tribe, or coalition of tribes – feathered not only its own nest but also the nest of its ‘people’, for example by building roads and schools in its own ethnic areas; and this was tolerated by the other groups so long as they thought they would ...”

“... founding the Men’s League for Woman Suffrage, after his call for the establishment of such a group was taken seriously by the progressive publisher Oswald Garrison Villard. The world of activism and public speaking suited Eastman, and he rode the upsurge of progressivism and socialism that resulted in the candidacies of Theodore Roosevelt and the ...”