“... the Utne Reader. I wrote sketches about encounters with people like Raoul Peck, Rem Koolhaas and Steve King, the racist Iowa congressman. The work was good but it didn’t add up to much. Would it have felt any more meaningful if people had read it? It’s impossible to know.About a year in I spent a day applying for a job at a publication that people did ...”

“... original,’ Dylan reported. ‘I knew what he meant, but I thought just the opposite.’) Brian Jones played the album for Keith Richards, who thought he was listening to two guitarists. (‘It took me a long time to realise he was actually doing it all by himself,’ Richards said.) The Rolling Stones used Johnson’s songs to convey melancholy and stasis ...”

“... selling ‘Never Kissed a Tory’ T-shirts. They have generated so much fuss that in 2018 Owen Jones had to make clear: ‘If you want to kiss Tories, Momentum are not going to stop you.’ However, to large swathes of the left, the idea of doing so has remained anathema (the former lord mayor of Sheffield ruled it out, in his ‘Ten Commandments’ for ...”

“... curtly. ‘You didn’t get the job’ was all he said.As a political disrupter, Thiel was a flop. Steve Bannon considered him too flaky for the serious graft of government, which is saying something. But this wasn’t really the game Thiel was in. Mainly it was just for show. What he wanted was to get close to government contracts. On 14 December 2016, a ...”

“... his desire to pose as the champion of blue-collar workers and his obsessive interest in the Dow Jones index, which doesn’t react well to his economic nationalism. While Trumpian rhetoric emphasises the dignity of labour, even economists inclined to favour protectionism have struggled to find any substantial group of American workers that has benefited ...”

“... to set up Unesco. William Beveridge, a Liberal, saw his Welfare State largely enacted; Creech Jones, chairman of the Fabian Colonial Bureau which had been founded in 1940, became the minister responsible for the colonies; and the ‘garden city ideal’ of the Town and Country Planning Association shaped the ‘architecturally modest and socially ...”

“... Yesterday (an error I fell into)? How be casual with Katharine Hepburn or do anything but gaze at Steve McQueen?My best plan, I found, was to make a mental note of who was there so that I could write home that night, then go and get some food at the vast buffet and gracefully retire. But it often turned out that the nicest people were at the buffet, or at any ...”

“... You can’t be in the same room with him. He’s constantly telling you something. He’s like Steve Jobs, you know – only worse.’ As we made our way to the new office – it was a building site that day, but would be up and running four weeks later – Wright presented himself as a man who was ready for anything. In a pinstripe suit and ruby tie, he ...”

“... that without factor concentrates, quality of life would be ‘much poorer’ for many. Dr Peter Jones, director of Newcastle’s haemophilia centre, complained to the Press Council that the Mail on Sunday’s piece was ‘sensational and highly exaggerated’, and had led to haemophilia centres being ‘inundated with calls from worried families’. The ...”

“... were ‘No tax on food, votes for the workless, pension for the aged, fair play all round.’Steve Elliott was Mitchell’s agent in the 2010 campaign. Now he’s doing the job for Onn. He was born to socialist parents in a long-demolished slum in the Marshes in the 1950s. He has a white beard and a wan resilience. ‘I’m the guy who goes to prison if ...”

“... agreed to behave as if the fictions of J.G. Ballard were planning documents, the painter Gavin Jones, working covertly and alone, excavated a wartime bunker hidden beneath a grassy mound outside a block of council flats in Bow. He disguised the entrance with an upturned boat, ran out electrical cables and made himself a set of dank studios; he offered one ...”

“... can’t kill them all. When I kill one, I create three.’ I heard that Congressman Walter Jones, Republican from North Carolina and the man who renamed French fries ‘freedom fries’, was now calling for the withdrawal of US troops. I heard him say: ‘The American people are getting to a point here: how much more can we take?’ I heard Congressman ...”