“... his Lincoln green beanie pulled right down, his hipstermonk beard, explained that his partner, Andrew, was the official guardian of the building. He had lived here now for a year and eight months. He was interested in photography and performance – and, in the wake of the recent excavation, history. The four-day removal of Hackney earth led the collective ...”

“... last someone has dared to speak out …’ Some of Powell’s lifelong opponents, including the young Devon MP Michael Heseltine, conceded that their constituents, even in rural areas which had scarcely seen a black face, were right behind Enoch. If the present system of election to the Tory leadership had been in operation, he would have swept home in any ...”

“... getting the clap,’ he remembered. In descriptions by himself and others, he emerges as a feral young fellow who did not let much bother him. But there are interesting moments when he takes a moral position; for example, when Dylan Thomas, who annoyed him by making assumptions about his relationship with Spender, irritated him further by boasting how well ...”

“... Views on Everything (‘Yes, Terry, I do know all the lesser-known Handel operas. I told Andrew Porter he was right – they are the greatest of musical masterpieces’). I was rapt, like a hysterical spinster on her first visit to Bayreuth. Schwärmerei time for T-Ball.The Sarajevo obsession revealed itself early on: in fact, inspired the great ...”

“... persist). Defra believes it’s time to arrest the decline of farming capacity. It wants more young people to consider farming as a livelihood and landowners to lease to people who’d like to grow food. Four months before the election campaign, Hilary Benn announced a modest £50 million funding top-up for food and farming R&D over the next five ...”

“... are rarely diapers for the babies and toddlers who have been taken from their parents. Some are as young as five months. In one camp, five hundred children are confined in a windowless warehouse. In others, they are encaged behind chain-link fences. In some camps, there are no hot meals. There are outbreaks of chickenpox, flu, measles, scabies and mumps, and ...”

“... that, had they liv’d, would have been extraordinary men of that kind, viz. Kitt. Battersby, young Jenkins, Hewlin, and many more. The mention of Timothy Cruso and the ‘Western martyrs’ is, as I hope to show, central to the novel Defoe was to write five years later. In his first full-length work, An Essay Upon Projects, which was published in ...”

“... It seems more likely that it stems from the influence of his other great mentor and guide when a young man, the Australian priest Peter Thomson, who became Blair’s closest friend and confidant while he was an undergraduate at Oxford. When Thomson died earlier this year, Blair said at his funeral: ‘There are few people of whom you can say: he changed my ...”

“... Boothby: ‘Why did you ever wake me? I never want to see any of my family again.’ She had four young children at the time. Years later, Boothby described her as ‘on the whole, the most selfish and possessive woman I have ever known’. She did not get what she wanted. Macmillan’s solicitor Philip Frere pointed out that divorce would be fatal for his ...”

“... chat to whomever was around or just people-watch. In this millennium, in cafés frequented by young white people, every customer seems to be silently staring at an Apple product, so that the places look and feel like offices. Even this phase may be on the way out. The next phase – of trying to keep customers from sticking around – has arrived. A food ...”

“... out his cavalry sabre and, balancing it on his dry knees, told tales of the Mutiny and young captains thirty years in their graves, till Kim dropped off to sleep’. What we see here is Kipling’s subtle rewriting of history. The adjectives ‘old, withered’ naturalise the man: he is portrayed not as an anomaly but as part of his ...”

“... of prejudice, refused to include women on their syllabuses and oversaw classrooms that transformed young women from confident, enthusiastic pupils into nervous, self-doubting shadows. Despite securing a tenure track job, she eventually left academia.Penaluna’s book started life as an essay which, when excerpted on the popular philosophy blog ‘Daily ...”

“... into the major leagues of bestsellerdom and landed him on the cover of Time, his wheaty, squinty, Andrew Wyeth-esque head bearing solemn witness to ‘The Adulterous Society’. Prefaced with a quotation from Paul Tillich and with a high-gloss finish (‘his phallus sheer silver’ etc), Couples lent itself usefully to brow-furrowed editorial ponderings on ...”

“... poor Keats’s options were. Surely it was better that (in the absence of other volunteers) the young artist Joseph Severn agreed to travel with the dying poet to Rome that autumn than that he had refused. When we rerun the history in our minds, wishing to find a way to make it all happen differently, it is hard to know whether, for the sake of Keats and ...”

“... and Roosevelt,’ and after Thatcher’s death the self-proclaimed ‘very right-wing’ historian Andrew Roberts wrote in the Wall Street Journal that ‘her support for Israel was lifelong and unwavering.’ All this is quietly and comprehensively demolished by Bermant, who has scoured both the Israeli and the British archives, and interviewed many of the ...”