“... of Storey’s This Sporting Life (1960), battered rugby league player Arthur Machin makes what may or may not be his final appearance on the pitch. Knowing that for him the ‘game’ (in more than a sporting sense) is up, he looks beyond its claustrophobic mayhem at the ‘life’ not yet ‘absorbed’ into it: at ...”

“... rust-coloured, iron-containing spa waters were once very fashionable; milk-white glacial meltwater may or may not be potable; and naturally bubbly spring waters command a fancy price. You do not want to see rotting organic matter floating in your water and, even if you cannot see it, smell often betrays its putrefying ...”

“... 5500 in 1977. The yard had just two orders on its books – the Type 42 and the rig – and so in May 1984 another thousand job cuts were announced.The stagers wanted to strike. Albertina had already secured them several significant victories; under his leadership, they had been reclassified as semi-skilled workers, which got them a pay bump. And he’d ...”

“... do more efficiently himself.Which isn’t to say that there weren’t mishaps. In 2018, Musk may have produced the most expensive social media post of all time when he tweeted ‘Am considering taking Tesla private at $420. Funding secured’ – a joke that made Tesla shares jump 11 per cent before traders realised that he wasn’t in earnest. The ...”

“... channel, a thoroughfare, an axis of change.The basis of Phillips’s oblique affinity with Brontë may lie in their shared conviction that the storyteller, real or imaginary, must already be in place – however uneasily – before the story can be told. The introduction to Phillips’s A New World Order: Selected Essays (2001) sets each of four separate ...”

“... she had left in the oven would get too dry at Gas Mark 4. Perhaps 3 would have been better. Dry it may well have been but there was no need to have worried. The thieves took the oven and the casserole with it. The Ransomes lived in an Edwardian block of flats the colour of ox-blood not far from Regent’s Park. It was handy for the City, though Mrs Ransome ...”

“... and supercharged sound systems. The fun lasted a while longer before the final crackdown. On a May bank holiday in 1992, several traveller convoys passing through the West Country were herded over to West Mercia, where local police had little experience of dealing with raves. The super-convoy converged on Castlemorton Common, just outside Malvern. Sound ...”

“... here. For intellectuals, in Africa and the West, on whom Davidson has had such an impact, there may also be a sense of the heroic project he has worked at for so long – ‘a history in the making’, as his book is subtitled, and one with striking repercussions on the present – having reached its outer limits. This is less a matter of Davidson dodging ...”

“... parakeets, which are spreading rapidly in London (a large colony at Sunbury apparently) and may one day oust the pigeons. Yorkshire, 29 March. The conductor on the GNER train to Leeds is now styled Customer Operations Leader and announces himself as such, though (and it’s to his credit) he stumbles several times when he has to broadcast this ...”

“... in the fields. According to an authoritative estimate as many as ten or eleven thousand Hauranis may go to Palestine temporarily in search of work in a really bad year ... the number of Hauranis illegally in the country at the present time is roughly 2,500.’ So while the Royal Commission said clearly that the amount of permanent Haurani illegal immigration ...”

“... is an attribute which is almost never applicable to performing musicians. However great they may be, they have no importance. To understand why Gould was the exception to this rule, we need to look at what it was that he, as the Nichtakzeptierer (to use Bernhard’s word), did not accept.An advertisement for Yamaha pianos has the headline ‘Performing ...”

“... three days before the party, Lowell had written to Hardwick: ‘I miss you both every minute. I may telephone for you to come and get me.’ The day before it, he let her know that he was ‘off to London’. ‘I’m sure your Faber party was exciting and how I wish I could have been there with you,’ Hardwick replied. ‘Look around for a living place ...”

“... on to Marx, Althusser, Poulantzas and Gramsci. ‘Quote marks’ round words, when ‘concepts’ may be ‘novel’. Italics – lots of them – when something is important and the teachers want to make sure you’re getting it down. There had been a Centre for Contemporary Cultural Studies at Birmingham University since Richard Hoggart set it up in ...”

“... at each other. Mr Kharrazi said: ‘There was no such dispute.’ She said: ‘Of course, there may have been little problems, but only little ones.’ Her husband nodded, and said, ‘Nothing big, though,’ and his smile grew chilly. On 22 September 1980, after months of skirmishing, propaganda and Iraq’s occupation of some border areas, Saddam’s ...”

“... gifted souls who carry a star ‘on their shining brow’. A Franco-Irish interchange like this may seem surprising, but that is largely because the current proclivity for embedding authors’ works in sealed and solipsistic national literary traditions makes it that much harder to see just how transnational the whole business of writing then was and still ...”