“... the troika’s demands. The fabric of democracy is unravelling. The unelected prime minister, Lucas Papademos, is a former banker whose only qualification for the post is that he ‘knows how the market works’. Politicians avoid public places for fear of being pelted with yoghurt and eggs, enter and leave parliament between phalanxes of police, and are ...”

“... known as a rock critic). Ian Curtis seems to have been the model for the band’s lead singer, Lucas Black, whose brain condition results in short-term memory loss, hence his copious written notes. The people around Black are either hopelessly attracted to his ‘endearing combination of, like, startling intellect and this weird childlike quality’ or ...”

“... important thing. In a presidential address to the American Economic Association in 2003, Robert Lucas, Nobel prizewinner and one of the most prominent macroeconomists in the world, put it plainly: Macroeconomics was born as a distinct field in the 1940s, as a part of the intellectual response to the Great Depression. The term then referred to the body of ...”

“... helps explain why Bevis Hillier has written an enormous biography of a dead English minor poet. John Betjeman: New Fame, New Love is the second volume of Hillier’s proposed trilogy and covers, roughly, the years 1933-58, the period when Betjeman, as Larkin put it, ‘became Betjeman’. The book is 736 pages long. Its predecessor, Young Betjeman, was 477 ...”

“... happen and in his new essay is pleased to record that it has. Some of this work is extremely good. John Roemer’s formal reformulation of the idea of exploitation, for example; or Jon Elster’s assessment of the extent to which Marx’s models of rationality match his own; or G. A. Cohen’s schematic reconstruction of Karl Marx’s Theory of History, for ...”

“... exercise book with star ratings and plot synopses for Meg Ryan romantic comedies, Disney cartoons, John Grisham adaptations, disaster movies and action thrillers, along with harder-breathing fare from the Dogme 95 group and Leos Carax’s Pola X, remorselessly grim and containing shots of what the censor called ‘actual’ sex, which I saw on 12 May 2000 as ...”

“... about Mr Wickham’s popularity among his fellow militia members. She is talking to Charlotte Lucas when she finds herself ‘suddenly addressed by Mr Darcy who took her so much by surprise in his application for her hand, that, without knowing what she did, she accepted him’. ‘Without knowing what she did’: the narrative behaves as if reporting a ...”

“... on its behalf, as well as well-connected political insiders: Reagan’s national security adviser John Poindexter, the Clinton strategist James Carville and, later, the disgraced general Mike Flynn, who was Trump’s first national security adviser. Former US government and intelligence officials were hired to fill executive and advisory roles. In 2009, the ...”

“... readers, the Chinese cellist Jian Wang, remembered that he had heard a young Australian called Sam Lucas play an instrument that met Kennedy’s description of Hermann’s at the 2022 Queen Elisabeth Competition in Brussels. (It was on loan to Lucas from the Robert Schumann Hochschule, a conservatory in Düsseldorf. How it ...”

“... Only A Vindication of the Rights of Woman could be readily bought, in an Everyman, bound up with John Stuart Mill’s On the Subjection of Women. In a second-hand shop I found a 1906 edition of her Original Stories (for children), with an introduction by E.V. Lucas and five of the Blake plates reproduced. The other modern ...”

“... Ravitch exposed the myth of an increasing noble stranglehold on offices in church and state. Colin Lucas pertinently observed that this was a society of aristocratic aspirations defining itself by the status symbols of the past – land, seigneurial rights and office – rather than the economic resources of the future. There certainly was a large group of ...”

“... fireplace. Hanging next to Gossaert’s Adoration of the Kings is Portrait of a Man aged 38 by Lucas van Leyden, painted around 1521. The age of the sitter is written on the scroll that he’s holding and, given his somewhat doleful countenance, if it said 40 rather than 38 it would be rather funny. I find it hard to say why I like the painting so ...”

“... He is a real person. I met him once and talked with him. He was amiable and decent, or distant.John Bleasdale’s The Magic Hours is both a monument to unstoppable research and, in the end, an admission that even such a thorough inquiry can remain inconclusive. Bleasdale hasn’t been able to talk to Malick, or to his family. But he has interviewed some of ...”

“... to marry them. In Lichfield, the geographical centre of Middle England, a statue of Captain Edward John Smith of the Titanic stands in a park bestowing dangerous blessings on newly-wed couples emerging from the nearby register office. In McKie’s version of England the past is generally not allowed to assert itself as a moral yardstick, a measure of decline ...”

“... left – does. Jeremy Corbyn is out of the party and won as an independent at the last election; John McDonnell had the whip suspended in July for voting against the new Labour government to scrap the two-child limit for Universal Credit or child tax credits; Ken Livingstone has Alzheimer’s. Their shared mentor, Tony Benn, is long dead. Beckett is an ...”