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“... free to oppose the Government’s devolution schemes for Wales and Scotland. This was the one major policy rebellion of Kinnock’s career. Leading the ‘No’ campaign in Wales, he put at risk many important friendships, particularly in the unions; but his sense of public opinion was vindicated when the referendum in Wales went 4-1 against an ...”

“... was established in 1860, Thackeray broke with Punch in 1851 (by which time he had written two major novels), and wrote only occasionally until 1854, when he ceased contributing altogether. There are too many of these mistakes of elementary detail for a work of reference. All of which is a pity, since this volume and the series generally is intelligently ...”

“... lightly masked by an insistence on the ‘difficulty’ of political and cultural judgment. The major casualty of this insistence is Williams’s prose. What may indeed be complexity in the phenomena often comes out in this prose merely as a portentous haze. But when the haze is penetrated, some things remain exceedingly simple. What Williams trusts in is ...”

“... murderous suspects. That policy might be callously wrong, and the Police Department overdue for major overhaul (as Bradley’s Christopher Commission had asserted when it reported in July 1991). But the jurors were pronouncing on individual guilt, not city governance. Koon had offered a Nuremberg defence: he was merely following standard operating ...”

“... technology: not for them slips of paper. B. Dalton was fully computerised by 1966 – the first major bookseller in the country to be so. Electronics had not merely revolutionised retail selling but had also rationalised wholesale distribution – traditionally ramshackle and inefficient in the book trade. Until the 1960s (the all-change decade for the ...”

“... markets can measure and therefore like, and uncertainty, which they can’t and therefore hate.) A major contributor to this sense of unchartedness was the decision by the ratings agency Standard and Poor’s to downgrade US government debt from AAA to AA+ status. This might seem like a small technical point, and it’s worth noting that the downgrade had no ...”

“... wants to publish a poem, he files it to the Press Association. Every government department, every major corporation, every police service and health trust and education authority delivers its official announcements to the Press Association. It is the primary conveyor belt along which information reaches national media in Britain. The boffins in Cardiff found ...”

“... form’ from an interesting angle. How do novels use, and make us accept, differences between major and minor characters? How do narratives make their protagonists complex and credible while also creating supporting characters who lack ‘interiority’? At the heart of the book is an argument about how the apparent singularity of some of fiction’s most ...”

“... on the results of this disastrous shift in taxation, Wang Chaohua merely observes that ‘major social consequences . . . are still unfolding.’ This is putting it too mildly; as Wang Hui observes, liberals react ‘with the greatest alarm’ to any criticism of what was effectively an IMF-type reform. To be fair to Hu Angang, he has focused ...”

“... specific projects, this money – £2 billion a year – comes without strings. This is seen as a major strength of the UK research system, making it more robust and flexible. Core funding helps top up grants, which by design do not cover a project’s full costs, and contributes to big-ticket items such as buildings and fellowship programmes. It also helps ...”

“... quagga. This curious form of action at a distance was given a name (telegony) and even inspired a major programme of experimental breeding. As a ‘fact’ it was comfortably embedded in most of the genetic theories of the time (including Darwin’s own) and was only rejected when August Weismann made it impossible in theory – the theory he erected on the ...”

“... only a few flying hours away, it may be time to start reflecting on a very different type of tale. John Hu, the Hu in Jonathan Spence’s latest book, was a man without guile, and without luck. He travelled to France from Canton in 1722 as the employee of Jean-François Foucquet, a Jesuit missionary, but behaved in such a bizarre fashion that in 1723 he was ...”

“... John Richardson is one of those gossips who knows – or at least knows about – everyone. For example (on page 118, to be precise), Marie-Laure (1), Maurice Bischoffsheim (2), the Comtesse de Chevigné (3), the Duchesse de Guermantes (4), the Marquis de Sade (5), Jean Cocteau (6), the Vicomte de Noailles (7), an anonymous gym instructor (8), Igor Markevitch (9), Diaghilev (10), Nijinsky (11), Maurice Gendron (12): I was the daughter of 2, an immensely rich Belgian banker, and the granddaughter of 3, who was said to be the model for 4, and was also – would you believe it? – the great-great-granddaughter of 5 ...”

“... older than, or at any rate comes a little after, the mind that did whatever it might be. The major risk for a writer of first-person adolescent novels is that they can easily come to seem like bad creative-writing exercises, in which the divergence between what the narrator sees and what the rest of the world sees becomes the main object of ...”

“... If you are already aware of John Gray (1866-1934), you may well have a particular interest in the 1890s, or in certain aspects of Catholicism.* You may have fleetingly met the name in period biographies – Beardsley’s, Yeats’s, Wilde’s. Wasn’t Gray supposed to be model for ‘Dorian’? Or you may simply have come across an extraordinary poem called ‘The Flying Fish’, which more than anything has roused and tantalised curiosity ...”