“... is currently concentrating economic power in the hands of a ‘cosmopolitan upper class’ – a small global plutocracy which threatens to undermine democratic welfare states by ensuring that a country which tries to protect its poor from exploitation will end up by depriving them of jobs. There is a danger, however, of exaggerating the stand-off between ...”

“... the measured outputs of the coerced and managed work-force with the unpredictable creativity of small risk-taking teams to which ‘rulism’ and corporate planning mean only death. The advocate of Excellence sighs with relief as the regulated work-place-factory, cotton-field or centralised office – is consigned to the scrapheap of history. In place of ...”

“... Milosz’s ‘Child of Europe’, of which this is Section Four:Grow your tree of falsehood from a small grain of truth.Do not follow those who lie in contempt of reality.Let your lie be even more logical than the truth itself.So the weary travellers may find repose in the lie.After the Day of the Lie gather in select circles,Shaking with laughter when our ...”

“... David Evett in Discourses of Service called ‘volitional primacy’ – a paradoxical variant of Stephen Greenblatt’s celebrated ‘Renaissance self-fashioning’, in which a servant’s selfhood is asserted through the deliberate performance of subordination. Its archetypal expression is to be found in King Lear: for the banished Earl of Kent in his ...”

“... more than a week old. In his book Vertical: The City from Satellites to Bunkers, the geographer Stephen Graham quotes Hito Steyerl, a German video artist: ‘Many contemporary philosophers have pointed out that the present moment is distinguished by a prevailing condition of groundlessness.’* Call it ground-zero vertigo. Non-specific ...”

“... Angela Eagle abandoned her campaign), it was another stiflingly hot day, and there was already a small crowd of people waiting on the street, many of them leaning on bikes. When we got inside, we organised chairs in a large circle and were told to introduce ourselves to the person next to us. More people arrived, and then more, so that eventually a second ...”

“... these benefits even when they are entitled to them.(This ruling is the latest handiwork of Stephen Miller, the 33-year-old senior policy adviser who is the architect of the Muslim ban, the separation of children from their parents at the border and the drastic reduction in the number of refugees admitted into the country. He has created new regulations ...”

“... anomalies: let’s go. Plenty of scope for solution opportunities, plenty of orange suits doing small things to big walls. Plenty of clipboards and white helmets with Tideway logos. The universal protective glasses make this feel like a serious kind of academic field trip, digging for misplaced royals or plague pits.The workers are busy and ...”

“... Street, which I do regularly, I hardly ever think about Leopold Bloom and the Kilkenny People or Stephen Daedalus and the ghost of Hamlet’s father, even if I decide to walk the route down Kildare Street and past the National Library. I studied in the National Library almost every weekday between 1973 and 1975, and it is easier to wonder who stole my yellow ...”

“... the right religious dimension? We still lack biographies in depth of key religious figure such as Stephen Marshall, Cornelius Burges, John Goodwin, Edmund Calamy, Henry Burton and others. They flit tantalisingly through the pages of Valerie Pearl’s valuable study of the London revolution of 1641, or Anthony Fletcher’s equally important analysis of ...”

“... deep sea keep you up. The second edition of Science and Poetry had not been out a year before Stephen Spender entitled his book on modern writers and belief (or unbelief) The Destructive Element, describing Richards’s note as ‘a focal point from which diverge rays towards past and future’. Certainly Conrad’s words give some insight into ...”

“... would damage his fledgling relations with Mugabe’s government. Rowland was embarrassed when Stephen Glover wrote a long, detailed and mainly accurate account in the Daily Telegraph of his links with Dr Jonas Savimbi, leader of the UNITA rebel movement in Angola. Journalists who interview Rowland are usually given long lectures about the justice of ...”

“... made little effort to stop the business ... the timing of the Chechen gangs’ transformation from small bands involved in petty extortion and stolen-car rackets into sophisticated crime conglomerates trading in guns and drugs coincided with the rise of Chechnya as a financial and political force.’ Sterling, also writing before the war, says that the ...”

“... of his ability to steer the bargain through Congress. The legislative triumph went instead to Stephen Douglas, a politician from Illinois who, though four years younger than Lincoln, had already gained the national prominence he craved. In 1854, as the government debated the admission of Nebraska, Douglas persuaded Congress to abandon the Missouri line in ...”

“... in the stage play in the 1920s; Michelle Pfeiffer, also fifty, was, as ever, Michelle Pfeiffer in Stephen Frears’s film version of 2009). The curtains are pink, as are the paper shades on the electric sconces and the ‘ravishing’ flesh of the nymphet in the painting on the wall. And Léa’s dressing-gown, and her underwear, and the strawberries she eats ...”