“... butcher that a fluid would flow down her leg and mix with the sawdust on the floor, a process the little boy beside her would observe with fascination. Other tropes include sessions during which he photographs his bodily wastes, which he’s been saving up for the occasion; cottaging, during which he’s beaten up and repeatedly violated; and a concluding ...”

“... of lectures given at the Jonathan Institute in Washington by George Shultz, Jeane Kirkpatrick, Arthur Goldberg, Moshe Arens, Eugene Rostow, Paul Johnson, Senator Cranston and many others with similar views. The blurb describes the book as a polemic, which it is, and ‘a comprehensive reasoned analysis’, which it is not. The thesis is that terrorism is ...”

“... companies mattered even in the 1960s, but the conservatively run corporations of that period had little difficulty achieving high ratings. In the 1980s and 1990s, however, corporations started to issue more and more bonds and take on increasing amounts of other forms of debt: Enron was far from alone in this. The debt funded necessary investment, but it also ...”

“... père died of a heart attack at the breakfast table while reading the Manchester Guardian. The little Canettis had loved England, and with their father’s help had joyfully learnt its language: relatives rolled about laughing when Elias recited a French story he had learnt at school with a strong British accent. The father, a gentle, civilised man, hoped ...”

“... tried to sell the ‘wedge’ strategy to American mass opinion. Wedgism, in any case, achieved little. Tito’s Yugoslavia was saved from economic ruin by American aid, but schemes for luring other Communist states away from Moscow by dangling economic carrots came to nothing. The real test and target of the wedgists was China. But when Mao finally won ...”

“... He resisted joining the many left-of-Labour organisations available. Unlike his friend Arthur Horner, he didn’t become a communist; he didn’t follow Mosley, for whom he co-wrote a manifesto, out of Labour into the New Party, and certainly not into the British Union of Fascists; and he didn’t approve of the decision made by his soon to be ...”

“... with the further advantage of access to the mass of Mansfield documents assembled over 22 years by Arthur Vanderbilt, who died in 1957 just before retiring from his post as chief justice of New Jersey, has now written the comprehensive biography that Vanderbilt had planned to write. The well-known engraving of Mansfield, taken by Bartolozzi from the portrait ...”

“... they didn’t know something about their subject instead of veering off into fiction. They took little notice. Schneer is endearingly open about the holes in the exceedingly tattered and piecemeal record of the Lockhart plot, some the result of weeding and redaction by intelligence services, some the work of nervous letter-burners, some just missing. When ...”

“... Enoch Powell and Lord Hailsham and co-opting left-wing outliers like Tony Benn, Eric Hobsbawm, Arthur Scargill, John Pilger and Stuart Hall. She set about coaxing – and sometimes wrestling – as much emotion and revelation from her castaways as she could, using the unthreatening stimulus of music, and the intimacy created by two people in a dingy ...”

“... into the civil service. In the other faculties, principally philosophy and the sciences, there was little discrepancy. Among non-Jews, there was a considerable tendency to follow in their fathers’ footsteps, whether into the public service (civil or military) or law or medicine. What is significant about the Jewish sample is the much greater proportion of ...”

“... as ‘wynde’. But these are the opening, not the closing lines of Amiens’s little piece and (more important) the piece is a song, whereas both the Browning poems are for the speaking voice. Moreover, we shall seldom recite either poem and in silent reading asymmetry will register willy-nilly to the eye: for the point is not how we speak ...”

“... to see a critic simply plough Proust’s complex and majestic ideation under the jolly language of Arthur Quiller-Couch. Having stripped Proust of half his wealth, the rest of Bayley’s essay expires into biographical gossip – pauper’s criticism. Bayley’s reviews repeat, at a lower level, the concerns of his more considered work. As Percy Lubbock was ...”

“... his struggle as Postmaster-General to have stamps issued without the Queen’s head, occupies no little part of these diaries, and in both cases Benn argues that, though the issues were small, they provide a chilling insight into the machinations of the Establishment and the dense and pervasive network which operates in this country to throttle democratic ...”

“... historiography or jurisprudence. He is joined in this appeal by philosophers of physics like Arthur Fine, who asks us to abandon the assumption that natural science ‘is special, and that scientific thinking is unlike any other’. Putnam and Fine both ridicule the idea that the discourse of physics is somehow more in touch with reality than any other ...”

“... life and this punitive regime was brutal. And then, when Blunkett was 12, his father died. Because Arthur Blunkett had been working after pensionable age – his employer, the East Midlands Gas Board, had asked him to stay on to train new employees – they initially refused to pay compensation. The resulting legal struggles his mother went through ...”