“... our mental health at the thickets of TLAs – three-letter acronyms, in the coinage of the writer Richard Hamblyn – that accumulate like dental plaque. Such acronyms now pepper every document circulating in every institution, not just universities. Like the necromantic mirror of the Snow Queen, they swallow everything up and deaden it. The code conceals ...”

“... mid-December 2014 the ruble lost half its value – its downward path mirroring the slump in the price of oil, which went from $109 per barrel of Urals crude in June to $67 in December. All this has been exacerbated by the Kremlin’s self-destructive decisions. In August, Putin introduced retaliatory sanctions against countries that had mandated measures ...”

“... than deliberately bringing them about. But the distinction is not always so clear: the stock price of Lockheed Martin, the world’s largest defence contractor, almost tripled between 2003 and 2007 after a former vice president at the firm chaired a committee agitating for war with Iraq. The Iraq war was also ‘the single most profitable event’ in the ...”

“... glossy magazines and brilliant public relations, that the ‘mark of sex and sin’ was worth the price. By 1927 American women were buying 52,000 tons of cleansing cream, 26,500 tons of skin lotion, 19,109 tons of complexion soap, 17,500 tons of nourishing cream, 8750 tons of tinted foundation, 6562 tons of talcum powder and 2375 tons of rouge every ...”

“... extended essay, unfinished on his death in 2003 – the pages about 1944-45 have been written by Richard Neustadt. There is much to be gained from Jenkins’s insights but Patrick Renshaw’s study, though equally succinct, is much more substantial. Renshaw is a specialist in American economic and labour history, and, as might be expected, his book has most ...”

“... a million votes labelled TGWU flopping to and fro at the whim of the power-brokers, showed the price at which the Left could be stopped. The elections for the National Executive at the 1982 conference have proved even more wonderful. Were 600,000 NUPE votes mislaid? Hardly surprising with so many millions of vicariously regimented members to account ...”

“... following Harriet’s disappearance with a scene after her rescue, is easily explained when Richard son’s novel is consulted. Since he was telling his story in letters, he had to follow a letter reporting Harriet’s disappearance with a letter reporting her safe and well at Colnebrook; the exciting details of what had happened in between could be ...”

“... to be found mainly among the professional middle classes, that ran through the Forties’. Yet Richard Acland, figurehead of the Party, had been a Liberal MP before the war, and Common Wealth might be placed on the far left wing of that broad informal alliance of reformers which produced what Addison calls ‘Forties collectivism: the belief in the ...”

“... to act as advisor to American buyers. To be sure, he took 5 per cent of the purchase price to Mrs Gardner, and the till rang into five or even six figures with gratifying regularity in the later 1890s. But, as Meryle Secrest emphasises, as long as he was counselling a buyer, he remained the adversary of dealers, and applied the strictest canons ...”

“... looming. It is an almighty mess. The leaders of all the main Westminster parties are paying the price for having put off for far too long the tricky business of readjusting Britain’s over-centralised, outmoded constitution. They have been waiting for a big enough prompt to get them going. Now that the prompt has come they don’t know what to do ...”

“... of him at the end of the 1980s was his undoing a decade later. By the time the US negotiator Richard Holbrooke met him days before the bombing began, there was no going back. Holbrooke told Milosevic, ‘It will start very soon after I leave,’ and Milosevic told Holbrooke: ‘There is nothing more I can say.’ The most intriguing aspect of the bombing ...”

“... took an interest in literary criticism, history and philosophy as well as society gossip. Richard Steele, the magazine’s editor and a friend of Swift’s, puffed the poet and his work in an introduction. This new writer, he said, deserved to be read and admired because he had ‘run into a Way perfectly new, and describ’d Things exactly as they ...”

“... actually – which were called Freeman, Hardy and Willis – were trained by Barry’s brother, Richard, who showed David how to work with the birds himself. Everything had the appropriate size about it.’ Loach’s sense of ‘appropriate size’ remains to this day the key to his achievement as a filmmaker.Kes marked a conscious departure from the ...”

“... colony. We have a programme and a list of guests. Jeremy Treglown is there, but where are Richard Gere and Bernardo Bertolucci? Where is Kurt Vonnegut? The bus sizzles along wet roads flanked by blackened chunks of Kendal Mint Cake and we debuss at the tiny Peredelkino church, where a service for Pasternak is to be held. The choir has not yet arrived ...”

“... and who had spotted all the members of Gaidar’s group years before they became a team, and Richard Layard, an LSE professor specialising in labour markets and wages, who with his wife Molly Meacher, another labour-market specialist, embraced the reform process and Russia and moved into a flat in Central Moscow to work full-time with Shokhin. Round them ...”