“... Manchester. The depth of loathing for Starmer that Labour campaigners encounter on the doorstep may help the presumed leadership candidate to remove him, even if he belongs to the same party. There’s distance between Burnham and the things that make people most angry, or despairing, about Starmer: his response to the Israeli slaughter in Gaza, his ...”

“... cultivators through compulsory purchases and discounted resale.While bans on glyphosate and diquat may eventually be introduced, companies will be hard at work developing their replacements. Icafolin, a novel herbicide developed by Bayer, is slated to go on sale in Brazil and Australia in 2028; applications for approval in the US, Canada and the EU are ...”

“... by high tariffs from global competition. The European Union has been good to farmers. This may now be coming to an end, for Britain may be about to leave. In 1973, when Britain entered the European Economic Community, the forerunner of the EU, everyone older than their early twenties could remember food ...”

“... in what were, for Lincolnshire, a strange few weeks in 2007. In a bloodless localist uprising in May, Boston’s mainstream parties were voted out of office by a single-issue movement demanding a new bypass. The Boston Bypass Independents won 25 out of 32 seats at the local elections, wiping out Labour, which lost 11 seats, and leaving the Conservatives with ...”

“... severed long ago. Mother One is elusive, which is perhaps what makes her interesting. There may also be brothers and sisters – and of course there was a father – with whom I have no material connection at all beyond blood. I’m still not sure why blood should matter or why we continue to repeat the platitude about blood and water. When I was ...”

“... short-wave radio that Guevara had been captured. ‘He has been wounded,’ we were told, ‘and may not last the night.’We drove for many hours in the darkness to Vallegrande, the forward base of the Bolivian Army in their campaign against the guerrillas, and arrived at nine o’clock on Monday morning. A jittery military commander refused us permission ...”

“... blue, and a diminutive grey-haired person in a drab overall called Janey, a sort of helper who may have been a poor relation. I also remember a plump middle-aged Irish nanny in a white nurse’s cap looking after my baby sister and a taller and somewhat younger nanny in a felt hat who took me to Victoria Park to feed the deer. The new house was at 78 ...”

“... it was Anita Brookner.’ The young man, who seemed remarkably undeferential, said security may have thought it was a device. The Queen said: ‘Yes. That is exactly what it is. A book is a device to ignite the imagination.’ The footman said: ‘Yes, maam.’ It was as if he was talking to his grandmother, and not for the first time the Queen was made ...”

“... difficulties.) We don’t know which novel Cooper put aside in exasperation in the middle of May 1820, exclaiming ‘I could write you a better book than that myself!’, but by November that year the first of his 32 novels was in print, and he was halfway through his second. By the time he died in 1851, Smith’s taunt had been answered not just by ...”

“... most Lib Dems, a large part of the Parliamentary Labour Party, probably William Hague, Theresa May, Alan Duncan and a few other Tories; Cameron and Osborne might be honorary or temporary members. The party of the right would include everyone else (including many members of the government). This would offer a more accurate representation of opinion than ...”

“... your word “genius”.’ Joyce was unlikely to be much taken by nature mysticism: what he may have found to admire in Wordsworth was his awareness of the momentousness that can attend the ordinary. Wordsworth could not have written Ulysses, of course, and would not have wished to; but the animating principle of Joyce’s novel, that ordinary events ...”

“... himself, contrary to revolutionary tradition, as the Bolsheviks’ undisputed leader. He may still, for all his later respect for and attachment to Lenin, have seen this as an aberration. In 1917, when Trotsky was busy refusing top jobs in the new government, his preference, apparently, would have been to act as the new government’s press ...”

“... first novel’, adding the characteristic gloss that ‘failure too is a kind of death’ and so may conclude the story of a life as appropriately as one’s last breath. Greene had famously gambled his adolescent life on the odds that one of the five empty chambers of the revolver he held to his head would come up when he pulled the trigger (or so he later ...”

“... had sent warning him against living with his mother. Thwaite gives this excerpt: Forgive what may be a terrible page to read, but don’t be robbed! don’t be robbed of your soul! I don’t mean by that exactly, simply, don’t live with your Mother; if you could do it without being robbed, that would not count, but can you, can you even live at all ...”

“... was arrested in 2001 for trying to transport a cache of Kalashnikovs and some explosives which he may have been planning to use in an invasion of northern Kazakhstan, with the intention of declaring a Russian republic there. Brodsky’s poem ‘On Ukrainian Independence’, written in the early 1990s, excoriated Ukrainians for wanting independence from ...”