“... of any decent publicist, this time van Middelaar places at the head of his book an epigraph from Miles Davis. It reads: ‘I’ll play it first and tell you what it is later.’ The politics of the EU in a one-liner.But the price for these moments of frankness has risen. Along with acknowledgment of the ‘coercive consensus’ of the Council ...”

“... this wealth, Leland Stanford founded Stanford University in 1885 on the site of his horse ranch 35 miles south of the city, and it was from Stanford’s loins that Silicon Valley sprang.In 1959, the Buddhist priest Shunryu Suzuki was dispatched to San Francisco’s Japantown to serve the local Japanese American community. Young white people who had read or ...”

“... lacked the ‘grandeur’ to be a Gandhian. He took up strange causes, such as the case of Garry Davis, an American former war pilot who tore up his US passport at the Palais de Chaillot, the UN’s temporary headquarters in Paris, and proclaimed himself a ‘world citizen’.Camus’s​ break with Sartre and Beauvoir wouldn’t become official until the ...”

“... from cranky freelancer to feted urban guru (‘the Mother Theresa of urbanism’, as Mike Davis, a rare dissenter from the church of St Jane, once put it) came about through her encounter with the slum, as a concept and, less and less over time, as a reality. It was the slum, in the eyes of the planners of Radiant Garden City Beautiful, that made ...”

“... him back. Jean Himes broke down when she read the book, and was found weeping in the desert, a few miles from a ranch in the Sierra Nevada that they were renting. She wasn’t the only one who couldn’t stand it. As Himes remembered, ‘the left hated it, the right hated it, Jews hated it, blacks hated it.’ His closest literary friends weren’t much more ...”

“... Boot says. He made a smooth transition to Eureka College, a Disciples of Christ institution ninety miles south of Dixon, with Social Gospel roots. ‘Dutch would go from success to success, untroubled by the taint of failure,’ Boot writes. He was ‘a cocky SOB, a loud talker’, a classmate said. And when he talked, people listened. At the beginning of his ...”

“... of the type we are living through now – much of Northern Europe was buried beneath miles of ice. Sea levels were hundreds of feet lower than they are today, and there was a thousand-mile-wide land bridge between Russia and North America. According to some palaeo-climatologists, 700 million years ago, during a period known as the Varangian (for ...”

“... in 2009 to mark the fortieth anniversary of Cottam power station in Nottinghamshire, Robert Davis quotes one of the employees: There was so much wastage during the CEGB days. It was like they had money to burn. The stores were always full and we had spares for everything. Bureaucracy was part of the problem. If you signed stuff out of the stores, even ...”

“... but the real computer, on which he’d spent a lot of money, was nearly nine thousand miles away in Panama. He had already taken the computers away the day before the raid. A reporter had turned up at the house and Wright, alarmed, had phoned Stefan, the man advising them on what he and Ramona were calling ‘the deal’. Stefan immediately moved ...”

“... The RebellionVII: The FactsFilm AudioI: The FireIt was​ a clear day and you could see for miles. From her flat on the 23rd floor, Rania texted one of her best friends from back home and they talked about facts. Who you love is a fact and the meals you cook are facts. When the sun shines it is a fact of God and England is a fact of life. Rania always ...”