“... hostility towards Europe, which only reinforced the wider electorate’s allergy to what Theresa May described, when she was party chairman, as the – perceived – ‘nasty party’. But did any leader or electoral strategist really have much room for manoeuvre? Bale is acutely sensitive to the ways in which previous choices and established institutional ...”

“... modern world as China and India, has implications for how we see American literature. Henry James may have lamented the social thinness of American history, and its apparent inability to generate great writing, but Stein’s formulation makes James look like an incorrigible 19th-century Europhile who failed to recognise that history specifically enjoined ...”

“... apt to prejudice people against her’. Souhami rushes to Cavell’s defence, suggesting that she may have been late to meals because she was with patients, and insisting that her ‘self-sufficiency’ was really the detachment that marks true selflessness. Whatever the reason, after qualifying as a staff nurse, she was not given charge of her own ...”

“... in the mode of Reyner Banham: freewheeling, spinning out ideas, theories and evaluations that may have their origin in the stony core of the built environment, but which spread to encompass most other aesthetic realms as well. Aesthetic but in Hatherley’s case also political: for it is the great strength of his writing – as well as its besetting ...”

“... it was named, was meant to show how education might one day be conducted across the continent. ‘May the Europe of the European schools definitively take the place of the Europe of the war cemeteries,’ René Mayer, the head of the ECSC, declared when the building, which took the form of a giant E, was officially opened on 11 December 1957. As the number of ...”

“... are not local and temporary, but are universal, permanent, contagious and indiscriminate.It may seem odd that this kind of emotional and visceral experience can be prompted by a poetry more usually accused of being merely literary, cerebral, philosophical – but it can. Thornton’s description rings truest for passages like this: Dental roof in spasm ...”

“... of small businessmen saw their city as a major economic centre of the future, unlikely as that may have seemed. In fact, the jump-start came with World War Two and the Cold War. Phoenix housed three military bases and a growing number of enterprises that benefited from what Goldwater’s Republican nemesis, Eisenhower (a man far too ‘liberal’ for the ...”

“... and Ohio primary results made clear that this book has at least a hundred pages yet to go. This may not seem a very grown-up way of following an election, but it’s been forced on us by the apparent shortage of serious policy differences between the two remaining candidates. The questions of whether or not the future president should meet with Mahmoud ...”

“... in a mirror. (Courbet painted two fabulous pictures of Whistler’s mistress doing just that.) You may guess that a painter of this persuasion is not much concerned with bipedalism, and has no time to waste on the feel of the ground underfoot. Hands and orifices are what concern him. Almost never in Courbet does the bottom edge of a painting establish a ground ...”

“... childbirth to keep population figures level. So while (as seems increasingly likely) homoeroticism may be a minority trait genetic in origin, and thus in no sense a cultural interloper, its social acceptance will always have depended, in the first instance, on the existence of a thriving community reproductive enough to carry some non-breeders. The moral and ...”

“... E.A. Poe’ – as if, he realises, Poe were thinking: ‘Damn it, I could use some of that, it may not be so hot, but it is at least too good to waste on my foster father.’ It’s a refreshingly unromantic take on the old romantic preoccupation with the writer’s relation to posterity. The overriding impression in this collection, however, is of a slack ...”

“... You may well, at some point, have known a girl like Cora: big, loud, gregarious, ‘full-on all over’; talented in smoke-rings, hand-jiving, arm-wrestling, withering looks; the one who always seems to know about make-up, pop stars, sex and contraception; with ‘a laugh like a sewer when the notion took her and no time to lose ...”

“... The previous year, her reception in Europe had been just as harsh. ‘As to her talents we may safely assert she never possessed any,’ the critic from the Sunday Times wrote. ‘Lola Montez has had a more complete fiasco than it is possible to imagine,’ a Belgian critic reported, going on to say that while she had never been blessed with any ...”

“... as any glance at the inner workings of Manchester Town Hall will show. Muddle in style may not much matter and can even be attractive; muddle in ideas is serious, if unmediated by dialectic. The generosity of Hunt’s account serves to make the Victorian city look confused. He begins with urban industrialism’s enemies. These number not only those ...”

“... of their pirouettes or the fact that they are silently upheld? Blankness is not emptiness; we may skate upon an intense radiance we do not see because we see nothing else. And in fact there is a colour, a quiet but tireless goodness that things at rest, like a brick wall or a small stone, seem to affirm. He goes on to set out his ambition ‘to ...”