“... the crew, weighing his options with Hamlet-like indecisiveness, is Ishmael, a ‘completely modern young intellectual’ who is left isolated from the masses, unable to ‘embrace reality spontaneously’. (‘No intellectuals in the world run so much after the psychic realities of their own souls as Americans,’ James wrote witheringly in American ...”

“... see red there As high on the clean hills Where soft sea-rapture fills The gladdening lungs. And young souls are freshed there And tyrant inmeshed there As in Athens or Ukraine. I would even go bail that the spring of ‘Spring Dawn’, undated, in 80 Poems or So, is that of 1920, during which socialism in Britain turned militant and Churchill sent tanks ...”

“... anybody over BSE? Public disillusion has reached such depths that no one now cares whether or not Stephen Dorrell or Douglas Hogg and their junior colleagues are telling the truth. They probably are at the moment, or at least the truth as they presently believe it to be. The reason the beef industry has collapsed is not that people think they are being lied ...”

“... campaign. By comparison, the first career had been haphazard. Well connected but impecunious as a young man, Clough began by chivvying relatives into letting him work with builders on their estate cottages, increasingly as designer rather than bodger. The process continued when he removed to London. Still impecunious but personable and an excellent dancer, he ...”

“... by gain. Maybe it’s to be expected, then, that the Marx celebrated by Roubini and his coauthor Stephen Mihm, in a résumé of earlier theorists of crisis, appears as a mere herald of continual disruption rather than as an economist who located at the heart of such crises the existence of bourgeois society as such, or the social cleavage between ...”

“... chief whip told him that he was ‘an utterly contemptible little shit’. Even for a headstrong young man it was a remarkably courageous thing to do. Macmillan never forgot it. Profumo then proceeded to enjoy a notably good war, serving first as an air intelligence liaison officer during the Battle of Britain, before seeing action in the battle of ...”

“... structure. There are times when Milton appears to represent Satan as his secret sharer, and, as Stephen Fallon argues in the Companion, he can hesitate between a heroic self-conception, ‘as unparalleled spokesperson of God’, and the fear that by over-reaching he has forfeited God’s favour. That fear and the anxiety that he is shadowing Satan’s ...”

“... in the frank confessional of David Schalkwyk’s opening chapter. In the apartheid world, the young Schalkwyk ‘was defined legally, socially and … psychologically as a “master”’, even as the material realities of bondage were masked (and painfully complicated) by the emotional bonds built up through years of familiarity and ‘surrogate ...”

“... sanitary and convenience products spewing into London’s river. Taylor Geall, the bright young fabulist charged by his Super Sewer employers, Tideway, with selling an upbeat message about reconnecting Londoners with the Thames (even when large sections of river frontage were closed off for the construction), commutes from Bognor Regis. His repurposed ...”

“... in the landing gear of aircraft and die. By the end of the 1990s it was thought that the number of young women being smuggled into the EU every year from the former Eastern bloc and forced into prostitution was in the hundreds of thousands. It is not hard to see why the traffickers are vilified by governments, police and the press. They can foil the defences ...”

“... the British people and hardworking taxpayers. The former Conservative prime minister of Canada, Stephen Harper, in 2015: The opposition will say, now, let’s spend and spend and spend. But, next year, we will use the fiscal room to do what we promised: cut taxes for hardworking Canadian families. The US Republican Marco Rubio, who wants to be ...”

“... these lines were tumbling off the presses: a symposium entitled International Regimes, edited by Stephen Krasner (1983); Keohane’s own treatise, After Hegemony (1984); and a host of learned articles.In the following decade this reassuring doctrine underwent a mutation, with the publication of a volume entitled Regime Changes: Macroeconomic Policy and ...”

“... effect of piano playing on this ordinary girl: ‘disjoined from her music-stool, [she] was only a young lady with a quantity of dark hair and a very pretty, pale, undeveloped face.’ As yet she doesn’t live as she plays, but Mr Beebe is, of course, prescient. Much later in his life, Forster, speculating whimsically about the future of some of his ...”

“... of, in turn, Edna St Vincent Millay, Sinclair Lewis, Theodore Roethke, Virginia Woolf and Stephen Vincent Bénet.When her friend Ann Davidow left Smith after one term, Plath’s first letter to her, written through tears, told her that although she’d come third in the nationwide Seventeen short story contest, ‘what the hell do I care about ...”

“... about the CIA involvement in its finances, another idea came up. Some of those figures like Stephen Spender, Frank Kermode and Stuart Hampshire wanted to start a counter-magazine.I don’t think ‘Encounter’ had folded by then.No, it hadn’t but Spender had left. Spender was a big figure in the CIA controversy. So the projected magazine would be a ...”