“... to study Havering make it hard to know what conclusions to draw from the results. Dr McIntosh has said bluntly that it was ‘at no time’ a ‘typical English community’. Until James I started to listen to those who preached retrenchment, the Crown was an exceptionally undemanding landlord. The Crown’s inertia as a landlord is familiar, but Havering had ...”

“... a longing for rescue from what seemed the hopelessness of capitalism. There were those, like Edward Upward, who believed (and, I think, believe) that Communism was never even tried, that the whole of Soviet history is a monstrous deviation, its extent marked by the almost unimaginable cruelty of Koba. Amis has tried to render that cruelty ...”

“... is also present, but the implied comparison seems to be stylistic rather than thematic.) Edward St Aubyn and Karl Ove Knausgaard, with their bad dads, would also have been apt. The critic Sam Sacks has called such books ‘agony novels’, but agony by itself isn’t usually enough. The third volume of Knausgaard’s My Struggle is immersed in the ...”

“... Roman-striped skirt. As if it were a movie, she was glamorous and aloof. The girl I was talking to said: “That’s Bunny Lang. I’d like to give her a good slap.”’ If Lang’s truncated life ever was made into a movie, this scene might open it.As Rosa Campbell points out in her introduction to The Miraculous Season, a new and expanded selection of ...”

“... and spent their last twelve years cohabiting chastely in a single cell. Andronicus, it’s said, never recognised his former wife.What did it mean – physically as well as metaphysically – to ‘become male’? In his provocative study of Byzantine sex and gender, Roland Betancourt points out that more than the adoption of masculine dress was at ...”

“... easily and strongly his feelings were affected. ‘It was a love-match on both sides,’ Johnson said simply. He was born in Market Square, slap bang in the middle of Lichfield, in September 1709, the elder son of Michael Johnson and his wife, Sarah, rather old and very proud parents. They had, Johnson recalled, ‘not much happiness from each other’, and ...”

“... like it at the time, but it was a gift, really. About me personally he seldom took issue. If I said something judgmental about someone he’d give me a look. I was once walking down the street in Berkeley with another poet, quite famous, a truly reprehensible shit. He doesn’t care for me either. We’ve just had a rather uncomfortable cup of coffee ...”

“... of its high rollers and low riders. ‘This is where it’s happening and I’m part of it,’ he said about the thrill of Hollywood in its heyday; the compulsion to be near the hot centre never left his restless heart. Somehow he was always in the frame, writing his name on the barbarous history of his times. ‘Clancy was here’ was the motive for his ...”

“... had by then had a long, long life; his period of renown as psychologist, author and sage could be said to have begun in the mid-1950s, when his book Childhood and Society began to take off; it peaked in 1970, when his picture appeared on the cover of the New York Times Magazine and a Berkeley sociologist quoted by Friedman ...”

“... in 1970 by the New York gallerist Richard Feigen. It was a genuine inquiry. He would love, he said, to show women artists. The problem was he couldn’t find any good enough. Stumped for an answer at the time, Nochlin continued to consider the question. Her response came a year later in the form of an essay that appropriated Feigen’s question for its ...”

“... Another senior al-Qaida figure, Abu al Walid al-Masri, put it even more bluntly. Bin Laden, he said, had led his followers to ‘the abyss’. A decade later those concerns seemed to have been vindicated. By 2011 al-Qaida had been reduced to a few bands of men hiding in the mountains along the Pakistan-Afghanistan border. Distracted by the need to evade ...”

“... as it has been technically possible for it to access is widely accepted. In response to Edward Snowden’s leaks, the NSA put out a statement in August to expand on the public description of its mission, defining signals intelligence (or SIGINT) – its primary job – as ‘the production of foreign intelligence through the collection, processing ...”

“... change can ever be fully explained. ‘We prove, we do not explain our birth,’ Marianne Moore said. There is always an element of the random in the historical which demands respect. If Shakespeare himself was a romancing artist, old-fashioned beside sophisticated and newly classicising contemporaries, it was perhaps because freer methods allowed him to ...”

“... relationship. Unreasonably, Bandini has just been abusing her shoes: ‘I hate you,’ she said. I felt her hatred. I could smell it, even hear it coming out of her, but I sneered again. ‘I hope so,’ I said. ‘Because there must be something pretty fine about a guy who rates your hatred.’ Then she ...”

“... at the same time not antagonising the National Party government to no good purpose: we must, he said, walk a tightrope through civil war, revolution and any other form of mayhem, and be waiting at the end to embrace the winner. ‘Some sort of war might well have broken out in 1899 even if gold had never been discovered in the Transvaal in 1886,’ Hyam and ...”