“... to spin around me. People wandered by. The place was a madhouse of bleeping barcodes. ‘How do you like it?’ one of them asked. I gulped it down and focused my eyes. ‘It tastes like an English field,’ I said.The store manager guided me to the cut flowers. ‘We are the UK’s largest flower sellers,’ he told me, ‘the biggest year on year ...”

“... the time, for most social purposes, nine-tenths of any group can ignore the remainder. They will do so all the more easily when their statistical superiority is amplified by advantage in other domains, such as ownership, social class, cultural or military achievement. The resultant hegemony appears more natural to those exerting it than to whoever is in its ...”

“... system, organisations such as further education colleges, charities and for-profit companies which do not at present have an allocation of places, but which would obtain them from this pool by undercutting universities. Students recruited from this pool by for-profit providers will be eligible for government-backed loans, so that public finance will help to ...”

“... hand, said, ‘You must be very tired,’ and left. Alan’s languid phone calls were often to do with professional humiliation. In the 1999 production of Antony and Cleopatra at Stratford the curtain rose with Antony on his knees pleasuring the Egyptian queen of Frances de la Tour. Even the jaded eyebrows of Stratford ...”

“... coal-based energy as a key condition of the Industrial Revolution, a notion others have sought to do away with altogether. But none has seriously shaken Hobsbawm’s case for the importance of the imperial framework. On the other hand, when we come to the second major epoch of industrial expansion, the global take-off of the 1850s that is the starting point ...”

“... and on football. He will be missed more than we can say.Where shall we begin? How far back do you want to go?Why don’t we go back to the Battle of Bannockburn?No, not that far. Your schooling. Your birthplace.King’s Lynn. I was born in Norfolk.Were both your parents Scottish?Yes.And your father was an engineer?Yes. A civil engineer, built sewers, I ...”

“... it goes, that increasing awareness among scholars of feminist citational practice has something to do with the current prominence of both. Yes, women do like reading other women, and seeing them properly recognised for their work.But it’s also, David Runciman reckons on his Talking ...”

“... not very happily in the late 1920s, a pretty terrible political poet, but also a lion-tamer (he’d joined the circus at 17) who cured Lenin’s dog when he was in Russia as a delegate at the Second Congress of the Third International in 1920. My mother remembers his signed photograph of Lenin, addressed to ‘comrade Clarke’. I was struck, too, by another ...”

“... Pelosi doesn’t talk about it. Nancy Pelosi is a disaster, OK? She’s a disaster and let her do what she wants … I’ll tell you her name, it’s Nervous Nancy because she’s a nervous wreck.’ Fifteen other heads of state dutifully sign the D-Day Proclamation at the bottom, but the president scrawls his name ...”

“... moving. ‘Revisionism’, the adults call it, though not in front of the children, because how do you explain the undoing of geography without mentioning that people like us could find ourselves living in the wrong part of the map, the part where the bodies pile up?Much better to concentrate their minds on the exciting futuristic constructions that are ...”

“... Six Counties.’ Or: ‘It is of no importance at all that the Tricolour should fly from the City Hall in Belfast instead of the Union Jack if Belfast workers are to find it as hard to live and support their families as before. Such freedom is merely an illusion and such nationalism a farce and a danger.’ Stuart told Fisk that he had refused to make ...”

“... enactment of the world vis-à-vis Ukraine: we care, it’s a tragedy, we’ll send stuff, but we do have our own lives to live. It was also, in a way, an enactment of Kyiv vis-à-vis the war. The city is committed, indignant, defiant and, in respect of the Ukrainian troops fighting at the front, gnawed by guilt. An aspect of that defiance, and a source of ...”

“... most experienced. ‘He was a professional soldier,’ Blackett says. Some soldiers seem not to do much except cheer up other soldiers, yet they surprise everyone with their readiness. ‘A good lad, who was definitely up to it.’ Guardsman Gregory Shaw says they left camp at 10 p.m. Wakefield’s head and shoulders were protruding from the top of the ...”