“... of good PR. In 1984, when Thatcher was trying to abolish the GLC, the queen opened the Thames Barrier, the capital’s new flood defence system, encouraging media speculation that she was opposed to abolition. It didn’t make any difference. The GLC was disbanded in 1986 and it wasn’t until 2000 that London got another unified, strategic ...”

“... just a master of the political dark arts, he claimed he modelled himself on a Tory predecessor, Michael Heseltine, who had pledged to ‘intervene before breakfast, lunch and dinner’ on the side of British industry. But Mandelson never had a chance to put the case. A few weeks after EDF made its move, he was on the brink of tears, listening to Tony Blair ...”

“... to voters outside New York City. Comey’s memoir has now surpassed the combined sales of Michael Wolff’s portrait of the Trump White House, Fire and Fury, and Hillary Clintons’s election elegy What Happened. The book, written in an idiom identical to the one he uses in interviews and press briefings, is clearly the work of an un-ghosted ...”

“... the beacon at the Crossness promontory, the official Thames path was blocked by a temporary barrier guarded by a couple of bored policemen. They were not, initially, prepared to offer any explanation. As the crowd of walkers and cyclists grew, they weakened and muttered that the hold-up was a matter of state security: a royal personage was expected. It ...”

“... the Germans were in full murder mode. Historical information and interpretation, based largely on Michael Marrus and Robert Paxton’s Vichy France and the Jews, have also been added. The 2503 photographs themselves: these have been reproduced from identity cards and gravestones, from formal studio portraits and intimate snapshots, from school, camp and ...”

“... not allowed to talk to the submitters! That would be wrong! And dividing them is an impenetrable barrier, that sacred and potent thing, profoundly respected inside banking, a ‘Chinese wall’. So nothing like this can ever happen! Except that here we would all do well to bear in mind something an experienced Wall Street investor told ...”

“... of delivering one cultural world – a much stranger one – into another, not only is the wit no barrier to an Anglophone reader, it is inseparable from the character-space of the novel, and its captivation. There, as its bearers, young women occupy a position in the narrative with which A Dance cannot compete, let alone A la recherche. Like Proust, Cao was ...”

“... lined up to replace him included Jim Callaghan, Roy Jenkins, Tony Benn, Anthony Crosland, Michael Foot and Denis Healey. It was, by any historical standards, an impressive cast list. The Parliamentary Labour Party made the right choice in plumping for Callaghan over the initial favourite, Healey, and the surprise early front-runner, Foot. Of all the ...”

“... witnessed. Formidably intelligent people describe Tristan in terms of a conversion experience. Michael Tanner speaks of its ‘qualifications for religious status’; while for Roger Scruton, Tristan und Isolde offers nothing less than ‘a sacrificial consolation for the imperfect loves of those who witness it’.In the early days, the expressionistic ...”

“... to make it clear to everyone how much you want to win. “You have to want it,” he said, like Michael Jordan demanding the ball in the final moments of a game.’ But when provoked, he reaches for a different analogy. On his last overseas trip as president, Obama complains to Rhodes about how he was let down. ‘He couldn’t believe the election was ...”

“... my career. They wouldn’t publish the book, they said, as a favour to me.’ In London, however, Michael Joseph agreed to publish Giovanni’s Room and, later, in New York, a small publisher, the Dial Press, offered to bring the book out. It first appeared in 1956. Both Go Tell It on the Mountain and Giovanni’s Room were declarations of independence for ...”

“... days of the OIHP and the fear of cholera, when the emphasis was on the need to establish a disease barrier between ‘civilisation’ and ‘barbarity’. Under Trump the US is no longer moving between the syringe and the watchtower; it is a riled-up bald eagle with a bottle of pills in one set of talons and a roll of razor wire in the other. His position is ...”

“... and Bellamy Foster in the US, as well as for European figures like Elmar Altvater in Germany and Michael Löwy and the late André Gorz in France, when he admitted that his work dwelt on ‘the reconstruction of Marx’s approach rather than its application’. Ecomarxism spent its first decades in methodological throat-clearing, outlining but not yet ...”

“... The latter envisages a kind of global ethics, ambitious and unwieldy: the echoes here are from Michael Dummett and Onora O’Neill and might be dismissed as utopian, were it not for the fact that human movement across borders is set to continue, with or without an international consensus about how it’s regulated.In Europe, the most startling ...”

“... dragging its sack of reverberating noise behind. There is, of course, no such thing as the sound barrier. What there is, is the aerodynamic challenge of the turbulent passage through Mach 1; and then the different challenge as the speed continues to rise and the airflow over the aeroplane’s wings changes in character again, smoothing out, yet condensing ...”