“... and ferris wheels; ‘Dystopia 2: London as Surveillance City’ is a reminder to get a TV licence, and shows an abstract cityscape of towers and terraces seen from above as if in a video game, with the legend ‘London is in our database. Evaders will pay.’ Something has gone horribly wrong, and the solace the authors find in the architecture of ...”

“... feels it does in the case of Meredith and Thackeray. (There is even something self-limiting about Tom Jones as a novel – for the same kind of reason?) As Furbank points out, the novels of Thackeray, Meredith and Trollope frequently take their very form from a social absolute – who is and who isn’t – which must be fundamentally unreal. ‘Evan ...”

“... took the rejection badly. When his followers were arrested for practising medicine without a licence, he complained that the United States made it ‘illegal to heal or cure anything’. He began to reconsider the distinction he’d made between psychology and spiritual practice. In a 1953 newsletter he wrote that the process of uncovering repressed ...”

“... doesn’t want to use the word stories here, or not always) are sometimes more fictionary (to use Tom Paulin’s word), sometimes less so; the wilder, more strenuous ones are usually the weaker, and end up merely irking the unflapped, flapped-at reader. Read here, in situ, it seems, in patches, an adorably local book. A selfie stick of a book. Our Thomas ...”

“... undoubtedly a gap in the market.  The Telegraph reports that I claimed for a black and white TV licence, the subject of much amusement among my colleagues. Today’s tabloids are particularly vicious. Not for them magnanimity in victory. ‘Arise Lord Gorbals’, the front page of the Mail sneers over a story focusing on the size of the Speaker’s ...”

“... document with redactions, gaps, errors and inconsistencies: two translations of an Egyptian export licence with conflicting dates, and two versions in Arabic, both missing the signature of the Egyptian antiquities authority and bearing a stamp of ‘A.R. Egypt’ for the Arab Republic of Egypt before it existed (from 1958 until September 1971, Egypt was known ...”

“... entirely (the bag lady joke is not so funny as to be indispensable) or drawing on fictional licence and inventing a winner who in no respect (sex, age group, type of novel) could be construed as a slur on Ms Byatt – the jet-lagged Antipodean, for example? Bradbury can mount a number of defences and might well think the matter not worthy of ...”

“... NRA spokeswoman Dana Loesch said that he shouldn’t have moved his hands to get out his driving licence. ‘I’ve been pulled over while carrying and I had out my permit before the officer got to the car,’ she tweeted. ‘There is a reason they teach this in classes.’ When the police killed Tamir Rice, a 12-year-old Black boy who was playing with a toy ...”

“... and that it pays tax in the UK. Its current CEO, James Tugendhat, cousin of the Tory politician Tom Tugendhat, says it’s important ‘to be seen as having a transparent structure’, perhaps because ‘we are the only major provider seeking to make local authority care the core of our operating model.’The residential care sector has an annual income of ...”

“... duty to argue and the zest to inflame. Its rhetoric allows, even enforces, a certain figurative licence. Like epitaphs in Johnson’s adage, it is not under oath. I was not alone in failing to see this. A few years earlier, Edward had published a review of Raymond Williams’s Long Revolution in NLR, which was more temperate in tone than his treatment of ...”

“... integrity in expressing them, mastery of the relevant sources and a forceful, readable style. Car licence-plates in New Hampshire bear (rather threateningly, it always seems to me, as big SUVs speed by) the state motto ‘Live free or die.’ In this spirit, the maxim on Hitchens’s crest has to be ‘Get it right or die.’ In the early part of his writing ...”

“... of his character as a drifter, with no home, job, dependents, living relatives, car or driving licence. His only possessions are a folding toothbrush – plus, after 9/11, a passport and a bank card – and the clothes he stands up in; every few days he buys a new outfit and throws the old one in a bin. He’s been on the road since 1997, when he left the ...”

“... of the not-permitted. And so, not long before we had Orton and Entertaining Mr Sloane, we had Mr Tom Sloan of BBC Light Entertainment threatening to drop Marty Wilde from the fledgling pop show Six-Five Special on account of his ‘Presley-type belly-swinging’. Fame was a new kind of licence. And presenters at the BBC ...”

“... Meades list: ‘docks, cranes, tars, locks, heavy industrial plant, gaunt maritime buildings, a licence to distil gin (So’ton and Plymouth only), ozonic breeze, prisons, estuarine reek, gulls built by Supermarine, piercing light’. Meades’s work is so generous, so rich and so obviously contentious that to mount a critique of it seems churlish. No ...”

“... treatment of more radical and deviant players, such as Mary Wollstonecraft, Jeremy Bentham and Tom Paine, is noticeably sharper and less evocative, and this points to the main limitation of his analysis. Any survey of such a crowded period of history has to be selective: but here selectivity and boisterous epigrams result, on occasions, in reducing ...”