“... in punk had been far more important than the music: they allowed people to live out a fantasy self; they turned the streets of Britain into a semiotic warzone.This bias towards the visual arts – fashion, film, the album cover as a mass-distributed canvas – runs through McLaren’s career. According to Vermorel, he had no real interest in music until ...”

“... Wilde’s second son – that kindled his interest. One of his first truly Cravanesque pieces, self-published in 1913, is a strange séance-like ‘interview’ with the long-dead Wilde, whom he also calls Sebastian after Wilde’s Parisian alias, Sebastian Melmoth. The piece veers between adulation and insult; Cravan is seduced by the possibility that he ...”

“... freely expressed in transactions rather than restrictive social circumstances; and describe self-sustaining equilibria of supply and demand when capitalist economies are striking for their growth and instability. Piketty wants to recover the scope of political economy without forfeiting the quantitative rigour of contemporary economics. He has hitched ...”

“... needs touching’ in the first 18 pages, and that the rest, ‘though I do not find it quite as self-evident as the beginning, holds together perfectly’. But then he said that ‘the political and social analyses are rather on the long side.’ He admitted his own chronic inability to understand … a phrase like ‘the Irish people’, or to imagine ...”

“... have free entry for up to three months, with indefinite leave to stay if they have a job or are self-employed. But Brits would be subject to equivalent barriers on trying to enter the EU; around a million are resident in other EU countries, above all Spain, where they can collect their UK pensions through the local post office and enjoy free ...”

“... society deepened after the 1967 war; it became explicit government policy under Sadat, the self-styled ‘believer president’ who supported radical Islamists in his battles with the left, and who made the sharia ‘the principal source’ of law in 1980 – a year before his assassination by an Islamist. Under Mubarak, praying has become as popular ...”

“... Here is the Conservative chancellor, George Osborne: We choose aspiration. This budget backs the self-employed, the small business owner and the homebuyer. We choose families. This budget helps hardworking people keep more of the money they have earned. His boss, David Cameron, criticising Labour in Parliament last month: They met with a bunch of migrants ...”

“... its own story. They came just as he was trying to revive his political career by returning from a self-imposed exile in the UK to start a new political party in Pakistan. And it worked: he cancelled his plans. In the weeks before her assassination, Bhutto had every reason to believe she would be killed. The failed attempt in Karachi made it clear that the ...”

“... of the city’s ancient reputation, the love-brothers’ rivalry over Princess Emily looks like a self-conscious heterosexual triangulising of a notoriously homosexual relationship, as happened most spectacularly with the story of Troilus (lusted after and nearly raped by Achilles in the ancient version) and Cressida. Among Theban men, Cicero blabbed to ...”

“... and advised many of the PPP participants. Originally, the government thought the scheme would be self-financing: now it is putting in £1 billion of public money a year. Meanwhile, Metronet and Tube Lines are making a combined profit of £2 million a week. Beneath it all lie the language and rules of the contracts themselves, which Wolmar does a courageous ...”

“... of civil society and internationalism. One group accuses the other of authoritarianism and self-righteous intolerance; it replies that its critics are wallowing in donor largesse. Nationalists speak of a historical racism that has merely migrated from government to civil society with the end of colonial rule, while civil society activists speak of an ...”

“... all considerations of mercy and humanity must bow before the inexorable demands of self-preservation.’ Civilised warfare obtained except when it didn’t. Whether what actually happened in the Valley or in other places was, by some abstract standard, merciless, pitiless and uncivilised seems a moot point. Contemporaries certainly thought that ...”

“... were modelled on their Latin predecessors (some English grammars were even, one might think self-defeatingly, written in Latin). William Lily’s Latin grammar, taught by royal decree in every English school for three hundred years, explained that in phrases like Rex et Regina beati, ‘the blessed King and Queen’, the adjective beati is plural ...”

“... and the lack of oversight. This created what the report called ‘a cabal of Special Branch self-interest that was fiercely resistant to any form of scrutiny … based on claims about a paramount need for secrecy’. Information that intelligence officers wanted kept quiet was routinely marked with the phrase ‘slow waltz’.The British government ...”

“... would be better but that ship has probably sailed). A TFR of 2 is also the cut-off for a self-sustaining population. In one case a sustainable future depends on not falling below 2 and in the other it depends on not going above it. But the climate number is essentially arbitrary: it has no significance in nature – nothing hangs on whether it’s ...”