“... magazine editors such as Kingsley Martin and Cyril Connolly, the editors of famous papers such as Michael Foot at the Evening Standard, the great publishers of the day, have all of them left their mark on the cultural history of the time. Their opposite numbers on radio remain to this day largely unknown, or, like Orwell, famous for other reasons. This ...”

“... like Jaguar and Rolls-Royce aeroengines, had been so unwisely privatised, became all too public; Black Wednesday itself, when delusion and false pride were punished with a speed uncommon even in Classical tragedy. One minute the Prime Minister sees the pound as Europe’s hardest currency; the next it is chased out of the ERM, softer than the peseta. And ...”

“... that had successfully salvaged a wilderness from corporate and governmental assaults. Through Michael van Walt van der Praag, a Dutch lawyer long active in the Tibetan cause, he made contact with the Unrepresented Nations and Peoples Organisation. This gave him access to the United Nations Working Group on Indigenous Populations, which he addressed in ...”

“... revelation in Pickles’s book. ‘I have not been able to reveal until now that it was Mr Justice Michael Davies who suggested that I jail Renshaw for seven days,’ he writes. ‘He asked how long I proposed to give her, and I said 21 days. “No, make it seven,” he said, and I did.’ There is not a trace of irony in this passage. Nor is there in his ...”

“... candidate since Dwight Eisenhower fought Adlai Stevenson in 1952. For the first time, a woman or a black person is guaranteed national elective office in a country that historically has been resistant to both. The two parties are neck and neck in a race in which – unlike in 2000 or 2004 – there is likely to be substantial crossover of support between the ...”

“... iron bars rigged up to the knee, one end of which slotted into deep holes in specially made black boots – until she was 16. During this time she had little contact with her large family, and a perfunctory education. Go through all this, and chances are that the first man who says he loves you, is kind and polite, and doesn’t treat you like a ...”

“... that the song means a great deal to his wife, Gretta, and longer still the essential truth, that Michael Furey, her dead first love, used to sing it to her. These layers of Gabriel’s unknowing are hardly different from our own (‘What about the song? Why does that make you cry?’ ‘And who was the person long ago?’), and at the end of the story, when ...”

“... up the slopes towards the French positions. In his classic account of the war, the historian Michael Howard described what happened next:The field officers on their horses were the first casualties. The men on foot struggled forward against the chassepot fire as if into a hailstorm, shoulders hunched, heads bowed, directed only by the shouts of their ...”

“... most assiduously was that of the Far Right. He was a racialist to his very core. He detested black people, whose immigration into this country in the Fifties and Sixties drove him into paroxysms of fury. He took the side of the Arabs in the Middle East for the only reason which has never been justified: their antagonists were Jews. He believed that the ...”

“... achieved over the last quarter-century with little thanks to his ostensible political opponents. Michael Foot and his dog Dizzy can stand as a tableau testifying to the magnanimity (or credulity) with which the old magic is perpetuated among political romantics of all persuasions. No, what scotched the Disraelian legend as serious history was the standard ...”

“... on the Daily Worker he went to Tribune, where Robert Edwards was leaving to join Beaverbrook and Michael Foot, recently a Beaverbrook man, was acting editor. (Will Mervyn Jones also end up in the Beaverbrook stable? the reader anxiously wonders.) Tribune paid him £16 a week to spread himself over the paper and, after Suez, he helped Foot with that instant ...”

“... onto the stage only once, with the revolt of the peasants of Upper Austria in 1626. They carried black flags bearing a skull and the words ‘It must be,’ because, as Wedgwood remarks, they knew that ‘the revolt would probably mean death for its leaders, whether they won or lost.’ However, neither she nor Gerhard Benecke, in the brief space allotted to ...”

“... to believe in a parallel world of different texts, or a random world of any and every text, or a black hole of absent texts which resembles a kind of Mallarméan mass demo. Collectively, they wish to ‘puncture English’s pretensions to cultural centrality’ by turning it into something even woollier called ‘Cultural Studies’. They recommend the ...”

“... and adventurous than the English; but neither the Beat Poets of San Francisco, nor the Black Mountain Group, nor the confessional and autobiographical poets that followed, could be said to have produced great art.’ (‘Alas,’ thought Harvard despondently, ‘there goes our candidate, Lowell.’) Worse was to come. ‘By the mid-Sixties the ...”

“... are represented only by a brief piece against utilitarian supply-siders, and his review of Michael Walzer’s book Spheres of Justice, in which Dworkin rather loftily denounces a theory which in fact has more to offer on these problems of equality than he allows – in particular, by allowing more room for the historical peculiarities of a given ...”