“... lets you know the service sector is really on the up and up. When it does, and if it does, there may be a few more jobs for young people in the suburbs, where so much of the vibrant secondary industry that provided work for their parents – textiles and electronics especially – disappeared years ago. Occasionally, through the haze of immobilism and racial ...”

“... none of you ever seen a Darwin who wasn’t mostly Wedgwood.’ Josiah Wedgwood’s chin may have gone underground, as it were, in the 19th century – hidden beneath those ubiquitous Victorian beards – but it has survived, as unmistakable as the Hapsburg jaw, to surface on many a 20th-century Wedgwood face. Unfortunately, parents usually expect ...”

“... the men from direct control over the work process. The institution of conciliation procedures may have been welcome to union officials, but it shifted the union towards a position of neutrality. In collective bargaining the unions were implicated in the decisions they helped arrange and enforce – indeed the author goes so far as to call them ...”

“... thought. But what did this come to mean in practice? Rigorous pursuit of an economic calling may be seen as an automatic route to capital accumulation, but this need not mean capitalist success. On the face of things, the government of Scotland was keen to promote economic development. Dr Marshall examines the economic legislation of the Scottish ...”

“... found it oppressive; but the majority lived in cheerful disobedience.’ Well, that is what it may have looked like from the perspective of Combe Florey House and Downside, but not, I can assure Mr Waugh, from the point of view of the Catholic ‘majority’ in ordinary parishes up and down this country. When my wife and I married in 1959, the Catholic ...”

“... go of that idea. The past isn’t some over-and-done-with thing: it’s still wet, malleable. It may not be the main track we’re on, which we call the present (as in the present tense, a matter of time, but also as in present and correct, a question of place, of being in place, another version of being there), but the past is there too, a branch line, and ...”

“... make a choice: he asked his wife for a divorce, telling her that ‘Jane needs me more.’ There may already have been signs of a drinking problem that would later become serious; certainly, Comfort felt that Henderson needed his commitment and more of his time. She may have demanded that her place in his life was publicly ...”

“... of the streetlights, Emma Caldwell gazed out over Cumberland Street. It was a Monday evening in May 2005 and the young woman’s photograph had been projected onto a block of flats near where she was last seen in Glasgow, on the edge of the Gorbals, not far from the Clyde. She had been murdered just seven weeks before. Appealing for witnesses in this way ...”

“... Wolf Messing achieved his celebrity in the Soviet Union during the Second World War, when he may or may not have met Stalin. After the war, he took his act to the circus and (like Bulgakov’s Woland) the variety theatre, both familiar territory for Soviet ‘mentalists’. During perestroika, Messing’s autobiography ...”

“... most of the tangible benefits.’In January 1977, Gandhi abruptly ended the dictatorship. ‘We may never know for sure’ what prompted her to call an election, Raghavan writes, but it may be clearer than he thinks: she went to the polls because she thought she could win. As it was, the opposition came together, uniting ...”

“... in public interest terms, motives are generally mixed, only God can see into the heart etc. We may be on firmer ground making distinctions between denunciations on the basis of likely outcomes. Under Stalin during the Great Purges, these included arrest, exile to Gulag and summary execution. While the denunciatory processes of McCarthyism had some ...”

“... time,’ the station announced, ‘we shall speak to you about America and the war … The news may be good or bad – we shall tell you the truth.’ Since then, VOA has produced content in 83 languages and is one of the few independent sources of information available in China and Iran (it was blocked by Russia in 2022). ‘It’s just radical left crazy ...”

“... You may not like the book, but you will be impressed by the index. There’s Bette Davis and Joe Davis and Sammy Davis Jr. There’s Basil Dean and James Dean, Jack Warner of Dock Green and Jack Warner of Hollywood. Jayne Mansfield lines up alongside Mantovani, and Field-Marshal Viscount Montgomery is discovered between Maria Montez and Dudley Moore ...”

“... by jazz musicians, as he had done in his Chicago youth more than fifty years before. Rexroth may have been anti-metropolitan, but there was nothing narrowly provincial about him, even though I can never think of him as having originated anywhere but in the American Midwest at the one creative time in its history. He developed an enthusiasm for the poetry ...”

“... Australia, nobody’s favourite union, won public support beyond its dreams; the pickets and the May Day marches were enormous. According to the Sydney Morning Herald’s senior political writer, Alan Ramsey, the machinations had been long, intricate and expensive: ‘Nobody believes the Government was ever an innocent bystander in the Machiavellian ...”