“... have licence fee income like the BBC, or state funding like Al-Jazeera and Sputnik, and isn’t cross-subsidised like CNN or Fox. Its overheads are high, its commercial income low. It has cannibalised itself, making staff redundant in the UK and eating into reserves in order to expand in digital and in the US. The Guardian’s print circulation has declined ...”

“... be found on the builders’ plates of passenger and cargo liners, tramp steamers, river steamers, cross-channel packets, oil tankers, bulk carriers and every kind of warship.As it happened, 1955 was the best year for Clyde shipbuilding since the Second World War, with 91 ships launched and enough on order to keep the yards fully occupied for the next five ...”

“... and North Wales Electricity Board, renamed Manweb. Littlechild said he had tried to persuade Tim Eggar, energy minister at the time, to intervene. Instead of worrying about the power over customers the takeover would give the Scottish firm, Eggar said he wanted to give Manweb ‘a kick in the pants’. Both companies now belong to Iberdrola of Spain. It ...”

“... hairdressers, on the BNP. ‘Fucking Pakis,’ one of the Yobs says. It is 11 September 2003. I cross the road and ask a policeman where to go for the press briefing. He points in the direction of a checkpoint set up by al-Muhajiroun. Al-Muhajiroun are holding a conference to commemorate the 19 mujahideen who gave their lives for the cause of jihad. I am ...”

“... Moore’s compass as a historian. He ends his account by quoting Thatcher’s private secretary Tim Flesher: ‘No other British prime minister would have won the Falklands War or the miners’ strike. She showed unique resolution and clarity. She was terrifically inspiring. If she hadn’t won, we’d be like Greece.’ This is partisan bluster. If she ...”

“... sounded a good deal like Orson Welles, as did that man on the bell tower watching the tripods cross the river with enormous strides. But to have noticed the odd resemblance probably would not have comforted anyone already hooked; it might have made things even eerier. After all, it was all happening ‘before your very ears’, and the ear is more ...”

“... statistics make estimating their number difficult.’ He refers to ‘new work on the topic’ by Tim O’Neill who, like Daly, teaches in the history department at University College Dublin, quoting a ‘typescript’ called ‘Famine Evictions’. O’Neill, he says, argues that in these three years alone almost 80,000 families were ...”

“... cheating. SATs are invigilated by classroom teachers, and although there are strict procedures for cross-checking, moderation and random inspections, it isn’t failsafe. Last month, one man was banned indefinitely from teaching after he ‘personally amended a range of pupil answers’. Sit in the pub with a group of teachers and sooner or later, you’ll ...”

“... anyhow, and it might be risky to pry: what is at best a ‘benign literary parasitism’, to quote Tim Parks, could ruin a good novel or poem for ever. It’s not just a question of revelation, of sordid details. I never thought about the reasons I didn’t read biographies, I just didn’t, and now I see that I distrusted them (and still do), that I thought ...”

“... Anyone living in metropolitan London is living that life around the clock.‘I didn’t cry when Tim died,’ Moore wrote: To be honest, I was relieved. He couldn’t see. He couldn’t hold his own cigarette. He could barely hold his own water. He knew I was there and he became flustered by my silence. But what can you say about your own life to someone on ...”

“... Inn at Earl’s Court. Sepideh had asked to be near friends. Ella would go on working with the Red Cross in the hope of bringing Sepideh’s family over from Iran to help her. (She arranged the visas with the Home Office. It was a painstaking process, but they came eventually and the council put the family all together in a temporary four-bedroom flat in ...”

“... heavy agricultural inputs. Worse, the farmer has no right to reuse them for further sowing or cross-breeding . . . It is the genetic revolution that may engender a new way of intensified agriculture and the programmed elimination of small farmers.It is happening in India, Algeria, and increasingly in places like Zimbabwe,10 and it is among the factors ...”

“... a great book but it wouldn’t have been written if Hitler had not been put away. He said that Tim Geithner, the US secretary of the Treasury, had been asked to look into ways to hinder companies that would profit from subversive organisations. That meant Knopf would come under fire for publishing the book. I asked him if he had a working title yet and he ...”