“... party had failed him; his grandmother died; the Cross-Bronx Expressway, built by the city planner Robert Moses, ripped through East Tremont, displacing five thousand people. In 1950, Bookchin joined a literary collective led by Josef Weber, a Holocaust survivor, who had brought together a group of former Communists to publish Contemporary Issues, a journal ...”

“... things in the longer run. There is the Yellow Way: making money through business. And there is the Green Way: going abroad, especially to the USA (whose green card, entitling the bearer to residence, gives this Way its colour). As Rice himself notes, the relative absence of goods has meant that those with money to spend have ...”

“... of grain and hillsides of orchards, where, in spring, white clouds of bloom drifted above the green fields. In autumn, oak and maple and birch set up a blaze of colour that flamed and flickered across a backdrop of pines. Then foxes barked in the hills and deer silently crossed the fields, half hidden in the mists of the fall mornings … Then a strange ...”

“... the Little Capacon River. My friend was saying that a lot of the American poets right now, like Robert Hass, the Poet Laureate, are not actually writing poetry at all: ‘they’re involved in a warding off of the poetic moment,’ he said, ‘they see that they have something in their hand, then they talk it away.’ The road was winding and narrow, and we ...”

“... of as normal classic names: Simon, Mark, Peter, Andrew, Paul, Martin, Michael, Stephen, Richard, Robert, David. Girls’ names remained more modish: some Sarahs, Anns and Elizabeths and even some residual Marys, but also plenty of Janets, Jackies, Lisas and Debbies, who soared and plummeted through the bestseller lists in the space of a couple of ...”

“... Hump’ as Bloomsberries called her, was 11 years older than Julia. The astonishing success of Robert Elsmere (1888) made her the second most famous woman in Victorian England. Her poignant saga of a young Anglican priest who defects from the Church to rediscover God in the slums of London sold by the hundred thousand in Britain. In America, unprotected by ...”

“... was trying to bury the case, Marina Litvinenko pushed for an inquest into her husband’s murder. Robert Owen, a High Court judge, promised an ‘open and fearless’ investigation. In 2013 the foreign secretary, William Hague, made an application for ‘public interest immunity’ – which meant that the government’s classified files on Litvinenko ...”

“... competitive tendering has effectively been suspended as departments have been given the green light to make ‘direct awards’ to firms; there is little, if any, accountability about the way these decisions are made. In late March, the Cabinet Office called in the accountants Deloitte to run a crisis unit to source PPE. The result was centralised ...”

“... provoked by the United States. In his memoir published in 1996, the former CIA director Robert Gates made it clear that the American intelligence services began to aid the mujahidin guerrillas not after the Soviet invasion, but six months before it. In an interview two years later with Le Nouvel Observateur, President Carter’s national security ...”

“... world in itself, with its own architectural traditions’. Brindle writes evocatively about this green landscape studded with tower houses, built to be defensive but elegant, their limewashed tapering outlines quite unlike the forbidding grey ruins that most have become. How comfortable and welcoming they were is apparent in the account of a 17th-century ...”

“... change the nature of the regime? Either way, the true nature of the protests is being missed. The green colours adopted by the Mousavi supporters and the cries of ‘Allahu akbar!’ that resonated from the roofs of Tehran in the evening darkness suggested that the protesters saw themselves as returning to the roots of the 1979 Khomeini revolution, and ...”

“... put their crosses just where they were going to put them anyway. But some recent research by Robert Goodin and James Mahmud Rice suggests that something more complicated might be going on.* The polls, they reveal, don’t fluctuate in the run-up to an election because respondents are simply humouring the pollsters with the pretence that their opinions ...”

“... Happy Moscow, was never published in his lifetime, though it now has a fine English translation by Robert Chandler. The eponymous Moscow is a woman, not the city, though she floats around it doing some characteristic 1930s-Moscow things like parachute jumping (insouciantly lighting a cigarette in mid-flight) as well as having various dead-end love affairs in a ...”

“... oxides, producing its distinctive colours: alongside various shades of blue, there was sage green, lilac and chocolate brown, all as matte, smooth and tactile as fondant icing. As well as vases of every shape and size, Wedgwood produced portrait medallions and chimneypiece tablets, buttons and buckles, teapots, inkwells, boxes and even chess sets in ...”

“... to take a look at was panting, at ease, unprimed, on the flags of the canal bank in Bethnal Green. His opo had interested himself in what was going on across the water. The man had a razor-shaved skull and small flushed ears, mutilated by circles of gold, disappearing into the only fat on his steriod-abused body armour. The pit bull was a statue, with ...”