“... be quite unembarrassed by his desire for worldly success and power, along with the luxuries that may come with them. It is in his dress rather than his language – Podhoretz’s writing is almost always elegantly phrased and supple, closer to Henry James than to Damon Runyon – that he likes to announce his lower-class affiliations. There is a pattern of ...”

“... collective life. And always, however stertorous and philistine the previous century’s slumber may have been, it was dreaming most deeply of that future life, and throwing up premonitions and travesties of it. Once upon a time, what we call ‘education’ consisted essentially in interpreting dreams like these – telling the children about tradition, or ...”

“... led the way in the shift of TV viewing to wireless internet from cable (although the internet may still enter your house through the same cable that delivers the TV). It has been adding nearly twenty million subscribers per year, from all over the world; it has almost a quarter of a billion now. It makes films. It churns out its own shows and buys ...”

“... politician who had lost to the liberal candidate in the Romanian presidential election in May. The rally, an all-you-can-eat buffet of anger, conspiracies and victimhood, drew more than a hundred thousand people who broadly share the idea that innocent white Britons are oppressed, silenced, cheated and disrespected by a malign, power-wielding ...”

“... which he was later berated in the 1970s,’ but surely, at a fundamental level, there is. Williams may recognise, unlike more conservative critics, that the village of the 19th and early 20th centuries was not an ‘organic community’ which had been disrupted by the social and economic changes of the past couple of decades, but there remains the structural ...”

“... that I had been hallucinating for several days, and I still recall images and fragments from what may well have been a meaningful though decidedly bizarre narrative, a story I was telling myself in a last-ditch attempt to create order in a life that had, by that point, become hopelessly chaotic. What others knew about these hallucinations I never fully ...”

“... these writings are in pencil, a pencil, Jen Bervin surmises in her introduction, that Dickinson may well have kept in the pocket of her famous white dress. Dickinson’s ‘one surviving dress has a large external pocket on the right side, where her hand would fall easily at rest’. The ‘economy’, Bervin continues, ‘of the pocket is worth ...”

“... becoming competitive with low-wage developing countries,’ Greenspan writes. ‘The United States may continue to lose manufacturing jobs but not manufacturing business.’ In the past, a belief that ‘discharging people’ was ‘an unsavoury activity’ occasionally inhibited cost-saving investments in labour-saving technology; but ‘a major increase in ...”

“... been put on them to stall the damage done by not having used steroids with the radiotherapy. They may slow down the infections, but have hideous side-effects; within three weeks of taking a ‘very moderate dose, of the weakest steroid they make’, my weight had shot from eight stone to eleven stone. Fat that feels as if my body has been stuffed with some ...”

“... implementing the conflict at the core of modernity. This argument, strained and abstract as it may seem, has nevertheless inspired innumerable readers struggling to find a place for themselves in the maelstrom of the modern city. Berman’s admiration, however reluctant, was a portent. In 2007, the Queens Museum of Art, the Museum of the City of New York ...”

“... this work, but he did it, just as he played his part in bringing Wolsey down. The chief agents may have been the men whom the French called ‘le duc de Nortfoch et sa bande’, but Suffolk marched in with Thomas Howard to confiscate the Great Seal, and declared: ‘there never was legate nor cardinall, that did good in England.’ In the resulting power ...”

“... how all these crises are interconnected, and how the solutions could be too. In short, Said may have had no time for tree-huggers, but tree-huggers must urgently make time for Said – and for a great many other anti-imperialist, postcolonial thinkers – because without that knowledge, there is no way to understand how we ended up in this dangerous ...”

“... Modiano, The Black Notebook (2012), in which an old man dimly recalls an affair with a woman who may have been a conspirator in the 1965 kidnapping and murder in Paris of the left-wing Moroccan leader Mehdi Ben Barka. Modiano has increasingly returned in his work to the early 1960s, a ‘bizarre and chaotic period’. But the long moment that underlies all ...”

“... life. (As my parents had recently returned from a 22-year migration to Lancashire, the difference may have seemed sharper to them.)The Highland Clearances stood apart from the everyday experience of having relatives in Manchester, Queensland or Vancouver: the evictions and cottage-burnings of the previous century were a long way from the easy matter of ...”

“... The effect of modernising pace and diction is a great gain in readability, but what is lost may be more important in this context. Here is Moore trying to reassure Cahun that her importance will sooner or later be recognised: We were living in an era when women’s voices were only just beginning to be heard, I said. It was a profound shift, and society ...”