“... of the Teddy Boy contingent. He and Westwood relaunched the shop as Too Fast to Live, Too Young to Die, then as SEX, and then Seditionaries, each incarnation associated with an increasingly confrontational look inspired respectively by motorbike gangs, the bondage and fetish underworld, and the military.McLaren had somehow gone from demanding the ...”

“... I asked her.‘Packed,’ she said. ‘The workers and the schoolkids, just by.’‘Where do the young people go for nights out?’ Karl said.She looked at him as if human nature were always biting at her heels. ‘You could go to Glasgow,’ she said, ‘but it would cost you a fortune to get back in a taxi. Even to get to Hamilton costs £22. But there’s ...”

“... Ernest Goonetilleke, the first native governor-general, said. This was a point of pride. Don Stephen Senanayake, the country’s first prime minister, remarked: ‘There has been no rebellion in Ceylon, no non-cooperation movement and no fifth column. We were among the peoples who gave full collaboration while Britain was hard-pressed.’ After ...”

“... the bad boy of American philosophy, Richard Rorty struck his colleagues as a safe and promising young man. His first book, published in 1967, was an anthology of Essays in Philosophical Method designed to document the reorientations in analytic philosophy that followed Rudolf Carnap’s move from Germany to the US in 1935. Carnap had promoted the cause of ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... in the groves of California): Today, we can look back at this little house and still imagine the young boy sitting by the window of the attic he shared with his three brothers, looking out to a world he could then himself only imagine ... When he became President, he took on challenges here at home on matters from cancer research to environmental ...”

“... new team have forced the departure of one of its political columnists, the deputy-editor, Hugo Young – a writer any newspaper might be glad to employ. As to what is happening at the Times – well, reading tastes differ: but who could ever have imagined that the Thunderer would seek to entice readers by conducting an up-market bingo game which is ...”

“... year of two Russian colleagues at different ends of the journalistic ladder – Dmitry Kholodov, a young reporter on Moskovsky Komsomolets, killed by a briefcase bomb while investigating corruption in the military; and Vladislav Listyev, killed after he announced that notoriously corrupt advertising practices would be suspended at the main state TV channel ...”

“... consumption and fossil-fuel burning in the world’s richest countries.The environmental historian Stephen Pyne calls our era the ‘pyrocene’, a global regime of burning: coal and oil, agricultural land and forest, bush and wetland, most of it planned. The Anthropocene, Pyne says, implies dominion over nature. He prefers to emphasise the fact that, wherever ...”

“... humour has a flintier edge. It is, for example, difficult to miss the disdain in a description of Stephen Spender as ‘a literary mover and shaker, knighted in 1983. His wealthy, artistic parents sent him to various private schools and Oxford, but he left without taking a degree.’ Similarly, it is hard not to detect the verdict of moral absurdity in his ...”

“... any of the band’s other songs. For a long time it was an obscure B-side – so obscure that when Stephen Malkmus, Pavement’s frontman, heard it playing in a bakery a few years ago, he didn’t even recognise it as one of his own. According to a fascinating article by the journalist Nate Rogers, ‘Harness Your Hopes’ started to become popular in ...”

“... wig doing most of the work. I am supposed to be entertaining, or being entertained by, a group of young MPs, my only line being: ‘I will mention your name to the Italian Ambassador. I’m dining with him tomorrow night at Diana Cooper’s.’ Most of the time our table is ‘background action’ to a foreground scene of some talk at another table between ...”

“... 2002 it had plummeted to $8000. The population had quadrupled since 1970: a quarter of a million young men enter the inhospitable labour market each year. Actual conditions cannot be determined with any precision; officially, unemployment is around 10 per cent, but it may be as much as three or four times that among the ...”

“... of his wish to take revenge on an overbearing father; a father who had once suggested that the young Freud, as he immodestly urinated in front of his parents, would never amount to anything. On this reading, the dream loses its political specificity; it is simply an expression of the universal desire for patricide. The Oedipus complex, the centrepiece of ...”

“... a conference on the literature of the Second World War. Asked for suitable names, I recommend Stephen Spender (because of his experience de-Nazifying German libraries after the war) and Alan Ross. When I mention that Ross served in the Navy and, in poems like ‘Murmansk’, recalls the war in the Baltic, Stabnikov seems satisfied. We pass the now famous ...”