“... answer to an enigmatic question might well determine the rest of your life. Born in 1933, Storey took the exam in 1944, the year in which the Butler Education Act came into force. He was one of the saved and made it to Queen Elizabeth’s Grammar School in Wakefield. The problems of the grammar-school boy like Storey were anatomised by Richard Hoggart in the ...”

“... of one of his neglected patients sets off to the cemetery’. Unfair, because Rae suggests that he took more trouble than might have been expected over his patients, but Beerbohm had put his pencil on the interesting fact that Grace had done a great deal better in money terms as an ‘amateur’ cricketer than he could have hoped to do as a medical man, and a ...”

“... matter for argument whether by 1959 he was mellowing into a position of authority in the party: it took his death the following year to transform him into the maligned hero and inspiration of British socialism. From then on, an association with Bevan has been an asset to conjure with for an aspiring leader. Harold Wilson built his platform for the leadership ...”

“... there is little doubt that Neil Kinnock’s two speeches to the Labour Party Conference this year took much of their inspiration from the hard lesson he’d had of it as he watched the miners’ strike grind to its ineluctable defeat without being able to say much more than generalities about its conduct, trying vainly to pin responsibility on a government ...”

“... of its publisher (Murray), who wanted more advertisements. The editor, Charles Appleton, took the path of noble independence and destitution. The Academy paved the way for the TLS, in 1902. The conception of the paper marked a considerable surge of reactionary confidence. The ‘supplement’ tag with its implication of second fiddle was merely ...”

“... of language in speech or writing. Like Chomsky, Saussure wanted to get away from what he took to be the superficiality of mere databanks of linguistic facts: instead he wished to fix the rules, valid for all languages everywhere, without which there could be no language. His structuralism is psychological, as Chomsky’s is, and oppositional, or ...”

“... last. He was devoted to an adoring and possessive mother; but his adoration, unlike Lawrence’s, took the sensible line of keeping away from her as much as possible, although he wrote to ‘Bessie’ assiduously every day. He saw the humour as much as the pathos in unequal relationships: young as he is, Leo is aware of his adored Marion as a comic as well as ...”

“... with the optimistic view that higher education was the locomotive of economic growth. Thatcherism took an opposite view. It saw no correlation between the production of sociology graduates at Essex and cars at Cowley. In 1981, there began to be applied the Thatcherite-Joseph doctrine of ‘strength through starvation’. Cut and freeze were applied with the ...”

“... though the Dervish forces were massacred.) Such imperial dramas – the Zulus supplied another – took hold of the public imagination back home, supplying stirring preludes to the great anti-climax of the Boer War at the century’s end. Memories and legends were still potent when A.E.W. Mason wrote The Four Feathers, made into one of the first Korda colour ...”

“... as he saw them, that science offered. His response to Bergson’s half-hour peroration took less than a minute. Its pivotal declaration was: ‘Il n’y a donc pas un temps des philosophes’ – ‘The time of the philosophers does not exist.’ What Einstein said next was even more controversial: ‘There remains only a psychological time that ...”

“... they’re going to have trouble repaying their debts – debts which, to a large extent, they took over from the global banking system, to keep it solvent. As I argued when writing about the Greek crisis (LRB, 14 July), this is a huge problem for the eurozone in particular. The euro story has continued to evolve in the direction it was always likely to ...”

“... between blocks. I ask a group of boys playing football whether they can show me where the murder took place. Their spokesman is courteous and takes time to point out where I can find Hordle Promenade. When I ask him to clarify his directions he does so and then goes back to his game. It is now just before four o’clock. I stop and speak briefly to several ...”

“... on Churchill’s life at Chartwell during the Twenties and Thirties. His son, the third Earl, who took over the work, died tragically young in 1985. Robin Birkenhead’s draft extended to the end of 1940. It had been shown to Sir John Colville, who was asked to finish the story. He declined, but wrote an epilogue giving his ...”

“... them. ‘The monastery of Evesham was suppressed by King Henry VIII … at evensong time,’ John of Alcester recorded, ‘the convent being in the choir at this verse Deposuit potentes, and would not suffer them to make an end.’ Four years into the dissolution, there were few wealthy abbeys left to seize; the very last was Waltham Abbey, on 23 March ...”

“... on Robert Peel, the prime minister. The young and impressionable Engels, whose daily walk to work took him past the Manchester offices of the Cobden brothers’ calico empire, was impressed. For the rest of his life, Engels was convinced that Cobden was the archetype of the English revolutionary bourgeois. So was Marx. Nowadays, Cobden is revered as the ...”