“... supported the same football teams, and wore the same aftershave. Meanwhile, Adam Ant painted a white stripe across his face and sported more lip gloss than Madonna.Transgression isn’t for everyone, but it tempts the future. A lot of the electronic bands of that period dealt in a kind of transgressive yearning, seeming to feel homesick for somewhere that ...”

“... The Fate of Rome (2017). The barbarians, meanwhile, have made a distinct comeback, since Peter Heather made a spirited case for their share of responsibility in The Fall of the Roman Empire (2005). Douglas Boin proposes another topical solution, blaming neither barbarians nor Romans but the relationship between them. One of the most important ...”

“... Margaret Thatcher died in 2013, Times Higher Education asked the former Cambridge vice-chancellor Peter Swinnerton-Dyer, who ran the government’s University Grants Committee in the 1980s, about her approach. ‘The instinct of a woman is to spring-clean,’ he said, ‘and this country needed spring-cleaning, not least the university ...”

“... His father, General Vladimir de Staël von Holstein, was vice-governor of the Fortress of St Peter and St Paul, where famous liberals had been incarcerated at the Tsar’s pleasure. His mother came from a more cultivated family, and was related to the composer Glazunov. At the outbreak of the Revolution in 1917, the family was compelled to leave ...”

“... in a country less than a third of the size of the Russian empire. In an essay published in 1997, Peter Holquist argued that the purpose of this apparatus – which also existed in similar, if not always equally extensive, forms in fascist and liberal-democratic states – was not policing per se. The Okhrana wanted to find deviants and punish crime; the ...”

“... Neal Ascherson, Ilya Budraitskis, James Butler, Andrew Cockburn, Meehan Crist, Sheila Fitzpatrick, Peter Geoghegan, Jeremy Harding, Owen Hatherley, Abby Innes, Mimi Jiang, Thomas Jones, Laleh Khalili, Jackson Lears, Donald MacKenzie, Thomas Meaney, James Meek, Pankaj Mishra, Azadeh Moaveni, Jan-Werner Müller, Vadim Nikitin, Jacqueline Rose, Jeremy ...”

“... of scarlet in evidence, in the robes of the assembled Council and of sundry invited academics, white in the vestments of the local clergy, and a respectable quantity of gold in the mayoral chains of office; there are any number of sombre grey suits on visiting diplomats and corporate sponsors; and outside the sunshine, if there is any, glints from the ...”

“... isn’t an uneccentric figure himself. He’s best known as the amateur historian of fiercely White Russian sympathies who was ordered to pay Lord Aldington £1.5 million in libel damages in 1989 after accusing him of war crimes for his involvement in repatriating troops to Yugoslavia and the Soviet Union after the Second World War. (The award was later ...”

“... which Rose takes in The 21st-Century Brain. I recall a lovely book by James Thurber and E.B. White, Is Sex Necessary?, among other things a spoof on sex manuals. In their day (1929) these handbooks had a lot of drawings of genital organs, with parts labelled, that made no sense at all. Thurber and White proposed these ...”

“... They should stop fishwives throwing the guts of mackerel carelessly away, perhaps to besmirch the white silk stockings of a foreigner who would then conceive a very bad opinion of law and order in Britain. This man was serious, and so was a critic who, ridiculing the idea that the appearance of Macheath on stage was a chief cause of crime, offered to reveal ...”

“... Puzo, Friedman, Brooks and the screenwriter David Zelag Goodman. Kurt Vonnegut began to show up. Peter Matthiessen was considered but rejected for mentioning too often his membership in the Institute of Arts and Letters. ‘It’s an organisation,’ Puzo said, ‘for guys who can’t get screen deals.’ Barring Vogel, the core members all got screen ...”

“... goes by initials. Hilda Doolittle also wrote under pen names – Delia Alton, Edith Gray, Rhoda Peter and Helga Dart – but she never published under any of them. Inscribing herself as H.D.  (well before Ezra Pound ushered her into literary history as ‘H.D. Imagiste’) she wasn’t swerving from prejudicial gendering so much as ridicule ...”

“... set out their ‘pathways to impact’.* ‘Success as a Knowledge Economy’, a 2016 government White Paper, rehearsed the usual clichés about the importance to the economy of research and tuition, but its true purpose was the construction of a genuinely competitive market in higher education, with new ‘providers’ entering and existing ones exiting. An ...”

“... from the New Deal settlement, which had privileged industrial workers and households headed by white men. The movement to curb state spending eventually led to a series of monetary and fiscal experiments, beginning in 1979 with the dramatic increase of interest rates under the Federal Reserve chair Paul Volcker and continuing with Reagan’s tax ...”

“... again seeks to perplex the eye: on the expanded right-hand side, in the foreground, are the four white-coated painters, poised outside the shopfront of a wine merchant, their two ladders forming an interlocking pattern that climbs nearly to the top of the picture; and then at the squeezed left, the severe vertical of the kerb, shearing away to make a ...”