“... significantly from the temporary release of the Balcombe Street IRA gang and the Loyalist killer Michael Stone. I remember die Kipling story, ‘The Village that Voted the Earth Was Flat’. I fear the flat-earthers and can’t be sure. Outside the headquarters of the Ulster Democratic Party (associated with the UDA) – a narrow converted shop on the ...”

“... The main vehicle for all of this was the Congress for Cultural Freedom, ‘run by CIA agent Michael Josselson from 1950 till 1967’. My first encounter (pun unintended) with the Congress was through The God that Failed, a compendium of confessions by well-known former Communists (and/or sympathisers) that included Gide, Silone and Koestler; it was ...”

“... Polish orphanages after the Armistice, the child psychologist Margaret Lowenfeld wrote that ‘the black misery of prisoners of war is very like the depressions of infancy.’ The study of the adult mind disordered by war helped encourage a fuller elaboration of the psychic life of the child, which itself seemed to be characterised by disturbance and the ...”

“... must try to recapture the visual impact of his architecture by different routes: through grainy black and white photographs taken prior to demolition; through Soane’s own sketches and plans (though how far these represent what was actually built is often unclear); and, especially, through the extraordinary perspective drawings and watercolours of the ...”

“... previously isolated communities were threaded into a network in the years around 1900, notably by Black rubber tappers who encountered ayahuasca in the forest and adapted its use for Christian worship in the cities, did the secret of macerating and boiling together a specific combination of plants to produce a brew for oral consumption spread across the ...”

“... Even when he was elected to the Senate at the age of thirty Biden hadn’t got into the black. In What It Takes (1992), a breathless work of campaign stenography, Richard Ben Cramer described the confession Biden made to his aides before deciding to run: ‘The debts – he went through his finances whole, the mortgages, the credit cards. He was ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... its humour less absorbing than before. Even that blend of the banal and the appalling, to which Michael Holroyd rightly drew attention, was not as compulsive as it had been. The past was claiming its own. Disillusion is in a sense completed by this biography: not, I hasten to say, the biographer’s fault, since he has made it as readable as Hamilton’s ...”

“... Mazzetti, then a student at the Slade, made a film called Together, with her fellow artists Michael Andrews and Eduardo Paolozzi playing the main parts. She shot it in the bombed-out East End, which gaggles of children had made their territory; her camera catches the wild scrambling, dash and hurtle of scores of boys and girls playing together in the ...”