“... came out of the school gates slugging from plastic bottles of pop – orange or green or black or blue – ignoring the rain, the cars and the time, attending only to each other. Some of the flags were torn by the wind. The Irish ones were tied to lamp-posts on the road to Market Street. Union Jacks and Red Hands of Ulster were up on Russell ...”

“... crime, ‘flexible’ on defence and foreign policy, solid for Israel, reputedly ‘good’ with black people, he is moreover young and once shook hands with John F. Kennedy. At the bar of the Sheraton Wayfarer in Manchester, the HQ of the travelling press corps, most correspondents report that their editors only want good news about the new consensus ...”

“... the Gulf Coast in close-up, a wave on Orange Beach that’s brownish gold with spots of orange and black oil on it, water acting just like water and looking just like paint thinner or gasoline.And then there’s the aerial footage taken by John Wathen, or Hurricane Creekkeeper, that’s gone viral on YouTube, Facebook, other facets of the internet, and the ...”

“... impulses of their enemies. ‘It’s no fun to protest on an empty stomach,’ said Mayor Michael Bloomberg to assembled journalists, ‘so you might want to try a restaurant. Or you might want to go shopping, maybe for another pair of sneakers for the march.’ New York is a Democrat city, but also a famous backdrop, and the Republicans took the ...”

“... about tax accountants. One, and the most obvious, is a novel about Irish dancers on tour with a Michael Flatley figure whose influence grows more sinister over time. Pounds of verbal oil will be poured into his perm; his bulge will almost rupture his trousers. His backstory – but surely you can picture it. One dancer is addicted to weed, another feels ...”

“... right of entry.Claudia Jones, the Trinidadian activist who founded Britain’s first major black newspaper, the West Indian Gazette, called the 1962 act a ‘colour-bar’ law which imposed ‘second-class citizenship … at a time when apartheid and racialism is under attack throughout the world’. The act wasn’t very effective: families were ...”

“... socialists and anarchists. The cops far outnumbered the protesters. A man with a megaphone and a black plastic boot on his head addressed the police: ‘They’ve got you dressed up like turtles.’ The turtles kettled the marchers to the east. I heard a libertarian carrying a Ron Paul sign discuss capitalism with a socialist. Could a pizza oven be owned by ...”

“... knows, the relief of that, the pub, the slope down into Newman Passage, the opening sequence of Michael Powell’s Peeping Tom, a puddle of bloody neon, awkward stone setts, smokers in doorways; and then out, immediately, into another world, Newman Street. Black leather, chrome, complimentary ...”

“... a mother (Lena) who has been to America, who might have had a different life there, and a father (Michael) who periodically folds himself into the arms of the monks to dry out. There is the convent where Edna was educated, and the eyebrows of the nun she loved passionately there. There is also the changeable shape of her first husband, whom she met while ...”

“... blood never having figured on the Bennett dining table even in its relatively refined form of black pudding. Some food we did consider too lowly to eat, tripe for instance, which was a favourite of my grandma, and chitterlings from the same ‘uggery-buggery pie shop’ down Tong Road in Wortley.Until I started to read the novels and diaries of the ...”

“... the Princess of Wales are of great moment to young Saudi women. Even the censors, with their big black felt-tips, have been known to spare the royal decolletage; the Princess shares with the Empress Maria Theresa, whose image graced the old silver coinage, the distinction of being the only bared bosom on view. As a matter of honour, arms, legs and faces must ...”

“... optimism -‘cheerfulness in the bunker’ – before polling day in the 1874 General Election. ‘Michael Foot might have said it during the 1983 campaign’ is a cheeky aside, given that Jenkins evidently expects his readers to remember who was in which bunker at the relevant moment. There is more to Gladstone, however, than politics. His restless energy ...”

“... Nussbaum that democracy requires a strong national identity on the part of its citizens, and Michael Walzer insists that his circle of allegiances (‘spheres of affection’) starts, not with the outermost periphery, but at the ‘centre’. In a book with the same title, For Love of Country, Maurizio Viroli offers further, more sustained reflections on ...”

“... Meanwhile Stalin, suffering from toothache, sits on the verandah of his dacha in Sochi on the Black Sea, rewriting the history of the Bolshevik underground in Baku, and brooding on the ‘technology of power’: ‘A state apparatus that is a reliable executor of the supreme will must be kept in a state of fear. That fear will then be passed on to the ...”

“... Wilson. The greater the distance from which human life is seen, the more like a certain kind of black comedy it tends to look. Updike has praised the ‘sublime hard-heartedness’ of Waugh’s fiction, and contrasted it favourably with the ‘claustrophobically human’ universe of Kingsley Amis. There is something of that hard-heartedness about S.. A ...”