“... control their own fate: ‘We are out for life and all that life can give us,’ the revolutionary John Maclean said at his trial for sedition in 1918. George Square, 31 January 1919 My grandparents met at a Glasgow ILP branch sometime around the end of the First World War, and I’ve always had a rather romantic view of the party and of that ...”

“... circuit, but he was less familiar with the recording studio. He was ‘terrible’, his producer John Hammond recalled: ‘Bobby popped every p, hissed every s, and habitually wandered off mike.’ But in another sense he knew just what he was doing. The album was made in just six hours of studio time – two three-hour sessions – at a cost of around ...”

“... that British new music – equally suspicious of European modernism and anything American, whether John Cage or Janis Joplin – wasn’t a club worth joining. Although he had no desire to take up 12-tone composition techniques, Arnold Schoenberg’s music appealed to him intellectually and he engaged with it seriously ...”

“... it is just that ‘she has not taken the step yet … that is hers alone to take, the step from No to Yes.’ ‘The Pole’ tells the story of this step and what happens afterwards.Its trajectory is a kind of descent, as Beatriz falls from ledge to ledge of her resistances towards an outcome that she consciously refuses at every stage. She will on ...”

“... all that he has fed on. Literally, in the case of ‘A Dissertation upon Roast Pig’:There is no flavour comparable … to that of the crisp, tawny, well-watched, not over-roasted, crackling, as it is well-called. The very teeth are invited to their share of the pleasure … in overcoming the coy, brittle resistance – with the adhesive oleaginous – O ...”

“... I n the aftermath​ of a devastating assault, Jordan Brown, one of the narrators of Marlon James’s new novel, returns to the scene of the crime.For real I’ve been daring to come back to this place but couldn’t find the right reason. Not true, I have a hundred reasons, a new one for each day. Sometimes I thought that if I just go back and take my own damn time to leave that I regain something that they took away, no, I don’t fucking know what ...”

“... me should you be considering the inclusion of material by the above author. I am most anxious that no conflicts in policy shall get loose, not only to our embarrassment, but to yours also.’ Gamlin was a company man and he clearly got the point. ‘In spite of the desire voiced by some of the children who wrote,’ Gamlin replied, ‘I have ...”

“... who are exploited by them, producing high-quality products for the most miserable wages and with no social security. These men and women are deliberately kept needy and hungry: otherwise they might have the leisure to think about what’s happening to them and leave. Saviano meets a talented dress-cutter paid a pittance for extremely skilled work. The same ...”

“... be altered to follow not what actually happened, but what ought to have done. Surely (in Ragtime) John Pierpont Morgan might have invited Henry Ford to lunch to talk about reincarnation; and why wouldn’t the anarchist Emma Goldman have given a full-body massage to the society divorcée Evelyn Nesbit (accompanied by a lecture on sexual politics)? These lines ...”

“... Life magazine from 1986 quotes someone from the AAA saying of this 287-mile stretch: ‘There are no points of interest. We don’t recommend it. We warn all motorists not to drive there unless they’re confident of their survival skills.’ It doesn’t seem to me all that lonely, least not these days, but it’s quiet enough. ‘I think I need to hold off ...”

“... science and technology. In the United States, this commitment was interpreted as a green light for no-holds-barred military and industrial espionage. Cyber-warfare became one of the administration’s major themes. In October 2012, the secretary of defence, Leon Panetta, raised the stakes further by declaring that the outcome of a concerted attack on key US ...”

“... did not appear until 1837 and was quickly supplanted by two popularising and very popular works, John Forster’s The Life and Adventures of Oliver Goldsmith (1848) and Washington Irving’s Life of Oliver Goldsmith (1849). Forster and Irving built on Prior’s research to reinstate – affectionately, but still damagingly – the simple, unworldly ...”

“... incontinence, and one politically feisty and unpronounceable narrative poem, The Bothie of Toper-na-Fuosich (1848), valued principally for its depiction of Highland scenery. His death in 1861 at the age of 42 elicited sighs over his ‘wasted genius’, ‘baffled intellect’ and ‘unfulfilled purpose’ from those who recognised the force of his talent ...”

“... Romans on the part of both archaeologists and scholars of Renaissance art. Corsi’s collection is no longer on public display, although the museum has devised a superb website based on its contents, made possible by the Esmée Fairbairn Foundation.There is another reason why the student of marbles should visit the Natural History Museum in Oxford, which Barry ...”

“... Stories that tell us something special about humans, perhaps, something we could learn no other way. But it’s not easy to see what that is. There’s a shaggy horse drawn in charcoal 13,000 years ago on a wall of the Niaux cave in Southern France, and every frisky hatching looks as though it could have been set down yesterday by a student leaning ...”