“... fierce polemics of the time – ‘urban v. anti-urban, romantic v. rationalist, and traditional means of building v. high technology’ – made for a more critical discourse on architecture than ever before. At the end, Jones and Woodward expressed the hope that ‘respect for London’s architectural traditions’ would define the new moment. Thirty years ...”

“... Early on, Jones mounts a pre-emptive defence against an accusation he knows is coming. When David Aaronovitch smarmily remarks, one Oxbridge-educated staff journalist to another, ‘here we are, having our elite discussion,’ Jones tells the reader: ‘Some will claim that I am, myself, a member of the establishment. But it is not someone’s ...”

“... as well as sentences like these, cumulative and insistent, as his own so often were. The title of David Bellos’s book on Les Misérables – The Novel of the Century – immediately tells us we’re in the territory; Hugo is greater than his rivals; Bellos has fallen under the spell. ‘I was entranced,’ he tells us at once of his first reading of the ...”

“... to have fallen on Robert Rhodes James. If so, it is an excellent decision. Meanwhile Mr David Carlton has produced a scholarly, well-written work of some five hundred pages. The author admits very fairly that it is in the nature of an interim verdict since the official records of the 1950s, including the Suez crisis, are closed under the Thirty Year ...”

“... upbringing (‘We were Methodist,’ she liked to say of her Grantham childhood, ‘and Methodist means method’) and partly down to her training as a chemist at Oxford – she was much more proud of being the first prime minister with a science degree than she was to be the first woman prime minister – and then as a barrister. But it was also a matter of ...”

“... it: ‘In a less confused world, his glory would be greater than his guilt.’ In a similar mood, David Thomson published a biography in which every chapter ends with a dialogue of self-examination by the critic, and in which Welles’s best-known innovation is side-swiped and helped to its feet all in the course of a sentence: ‘In truth, there was more ...”

“... Israel decided to stop Gaza’s electricity for a few hours a day. Despite the fact that this means, for instance, that electricity will fail to reach hospitals, it was said that ‘the Israeli government decided to approve this step, as another non-lethal weapon.’ Another thing the soldiers do is clearing – khisuf. In regular Hebrew, khisuf ...”

“... before a slew of factoids, at once urgent and ephemeral. What does it all mean? For some, what it means matters less than the fact it’s there at all. When, after his arrest, Julian Assange appeared in a Westminster court for a pre-extradition hearing, there was the odd spectacle of John Pilger and Ken Loach outside pledging surety for Assange’s ...”

“... memory space that allows him to believe that the first time has, in a way, never happened, and so means that dope never gets old. The novelty doesn’t come from the feeling of doing the drug, which Clune says ‘starts to suck pretty quickly’. Instead it’s the image, and the persistent newness of the image, that keeps him coming back: Something that’s ...”

“... far from radical. His support for taking the knee depends on a minimal view of what that action means. Steve Baker, the MP for Wycombe, insisted on Radio 4 that the players were ‘saying no to racism … they are not saying defund the police.’ Harri promised viewers that ‘whatever nerdy academics tell you about Black Lives Matter associations, taking ...”

“... Tracking population growth, urbanisation and economic change through regular counts was a means of rendering those phenomena knowable and susceptible to intervention. New kinds of data allowed men like William Farr, who was responsible for the General Register Office’s collection of medical statistics, to develop modern epidemiology, tracking death ...”

“... suggest. One of its products is the kind of wildly inconsistent rhetoric dissected by David Bromwich in Politics by Other Means: the insistence that you are only an authentic black if you identify your self with your blackness, only an authentic gay if you identify your self with your gayness, etc. Another is ...”

“... becomes a ‘wasm’, everyone will wonder what all the fuss was about. Abroad, the term means nothing, although there are probably one or two European politicians who think it has something to do with being rude to foreigners at conferences. True, in some other countries, but not in Germany or Japan, or not for long, New Right ideology has been ...”

“... to such ideas as God and Satan, good and evil, faith and reason, freedom and fate. By means of such systems, contradictory absolutes can be fitted to the otherwise intractable realities of everyday life. Accordingly, distance from the ‘centre’ means estrangement from what is conventionally understood as ...”

“... remarks that he has seldom been remiss in spotting opportunities and in putting together the means to seize them. In his hands everything, everyone could be an instrument. He was the most versatile player in Australia and among the readiest in Britain and the United States: but what would he play? He was on a random walk, and despite the ever greater ...”