“... And Joseph also went up from Galilee, out of the city of Nazareth, into Judaea, unto the city of David, which is called Bethlehem’ – because he was of the house and lineage of David – ‘to be taxed with Mary his espoused wife, being great with child.’ The precise detail, it is often said, conveys that concern with ...”

“... wilderness, Pym’s novel Quartet in Autumn had at last been accepted for publication: Larkin and David Cecil had independently named her as their choice of ‘most undervalued writer’ in the 75th-anniversary number of the TLS. As Pym’s diary records, they had kipper pâté to start, after sherry; and then ‘veal done with peppers and tomatoes, Pommes ...”

“... Labour landslide year, that the first Nuffield election study appeared, with the hand of a young David Butler already apparent. It was, sadly, a jejune and disappointing volume which explains very little of the last great realigning election of modern times. Since then Butler has taken an increasingly dominant role in the enterprise and the books have ...”

“... In a speech​  at the University of East London in February 2010 David Cameron, then leader of the opposition, promised to lift the lid on ‘secret corporate lobbying’. The ‘far too cosy relationship between politics, government, business and money’, he said, would end on his watch. The full text of his speech isn’t easy to find – the Conservative Party erased ten years’ worth of speeches and press releases from its website in 2013 – but the internet doesn’t forget ...”

“... fact of literary education.’ Like Lawrence, Lessing is an author whose life and work are held to be intimately attuned to the Zeitgeist. Assessments of her writing usually home in on her ability to interpret and challenge the mood of the times, and wittingly or unwittingly, in her oracular pronouncements on everything from CND to paedophilia, Lessing ...”

“... Bush’s expectations of what will be achieved by the conference he recently announced would be held in the autumn (it has now been downgraded to a ‘meeting’). In his view, all previous peace initiatives have failed largely, if not exclusively, because Palestinians were not ready for a state of their own. The meeting will therefore focus narrowly on ...”

“... social forms and a war on ‘woke’. Hazony’s The Virtue of Nationalism is often held up as the ur-text of post-liberal thought. Yet many of national conservatism’s intellectual lodestars, such as the Ohio senator J.D. Vance (who appeared remotely in London, extolling the virtues of guns and coal), are better known for their fiery ...”

“... Scowcroft, James Baker) rather than from the Democrats or the Left? Samantha Power and David Halberstam did not set out to solve this riddle, but they have unintentionally provided an important part of the answer. Power was motivated to study the history of disappointing US responses to genocide by her indignation at the Clinton Administration’s ...”

“... cannot see this particular passage correctly even when he looks at it closely. Foucault’s view, held more strongly then than now, is that what individuals can think, and what they think they can know, is conditioned by a framework or system that permits certain things to be significant and excludes other possibilities. So he says there is a system that ...”

“... Party from 1933 until 1936, is an interesting case-study here. After the war, he was arrested and held at Nuremberg, where he was questioned by an American lawyer about the intellectual support he had given to Hitler’s regime. How could he explain his actions? Schmitt replied that he had been deceived about Hitler. What he had thought he was getting in 1933 ...”

“... opening sequence of a baggage train in hectic descent from a mountain peak, he cuts to a shot, held for at least a minute, of the raging waters of the Río Urubamba in the valley below. Three seconds of this would ordinarily have been enough, he has explained, to set a scene; the point of dwelling on an image of turbulent chaos is instead to prepare the ...”

“... of the voters had left their quiet houses, voted ‘No’, gone home and shut the door. At seven David Cameron was on the radio. He intoned the words ‘our United Kingdom’ so many times I thought I’d be sick. Whose United Kingdom? Theirs. The Eton Mess and their cronies. Big Business. Neocons. The warmongers. Not ours. We left Edinburgh at ...”

“... been a part of his work; Outcast London began with a survey of British economic thought from David Ricardo to William Stanley Jevons. Now, Stedman Jones’s commitment to the constitutive power of language propelled him down a path that eventually led to a tamed version of social democracy. In An End to Poverty (2004), he sought to recover a lost ...”

“... and bringing the experience of the present to bear upon the interpretation of the past’; it held huge, radical and ecumenical events, published pamphlets and books, and in 1976 founded its own journal, still running today.Despite – or perhaps because of – all this activity, Samuel only published one sole-authored book in his lifetime, Theatres of ...”

“... immediately after the war, conditions in Britain, especially in the cities, were pretty grim. As David Kynaston tells it, people were exhausted, low in spirits, their resources depleted, and over everything there hung the threat of another, probably terminal war. The dawn of the postwar era was cold and dark and bleak, but there was a touch of pink in the ...”