“... being mainly bound up with emotional and poetic concerns. The other is a little-known book by Bob Brown, a New York journalist who celebrated the life of the ‘slackers’ – as the drop-outs and draft-dodgers of the day were known – in a fictionalised memoir called You Gotta Live, published in 1932. In this, Cravan appears as Rex Johns and Loy as ...”

“... of Hunt. The Irish Times.’ Lennox wearily levered his torso forward to look down at Hunty’s brown and punctured shoe tops. As slowly he lowered himself backward to look strabismally into Hunty’s boyish face. Hunty, his quarry at last in sight, could not but offer to refresh the balloon glass. On the nod he brought back two doubles, sat, notebook ...”

“... The Manchurian Candidate), slid ticketless into the Texas Theatre in Dallas, for a double bill that would otherwise have drifted beyond record: Cry of Battle, set in the Philippines, and War is Hell!, a Korean War quickie narrated by the much decorated Audie Murphy. Oswald fixed his time and period just as the bank robber John Dillinger confirmed both ...”

“... could mean the end of the act. Not for the British, who will probably have some kind of beefed-up Bill of Rights for Clegg to boast about, but for the immigrants, asylum seekers and suspected terrorists whose humanity the act at least notices and occasionally protects. The ridiculously entitled Freedom Bill has already put ...”

“... of essays, mostly attacks on Orwell from the Left. The militants are Malcolm Evans, Alan Brown, Alaric Jacob, Bill Alexander, Robert Stradling, Beatrix Campbell, Deirdre Beddoe, Stephen Sedley, Lynette Hunter, Andy Croft, Stuart Hall, Antony Easthope and Christopher Norris. The attacks are now commonplace. Raymond ...”

“... where discrimination had been found, was rapidly accepted by Roy Jenkins, although by the time the Bill was introduced in 1968, he had gone to the Exchequer and Mr Callaghan was at the Home Office. It was always intended that the first PEP Report would be followed at intervals by surveys which would monitor the situation, assess the impact of the law and ...”

“... eye than abortion. In Britain abortion was legalised as a result of David Steel’s Abortion Bill of 1967, but in the US abortion rights have never had democratic legitimacy of this kind, resting instead on the 7-2 decision reached by nine male judges in Roe v. Wade (1973). The justices managed to establish abortion rights in the absence of legislative ...”

“... Guardian covered the recent Budget, it had a lot of fun unpacking the surprises sprung by Gordon Brown in the course of his demonstration that ‘all this prudence is for a purpose.’ The point was that his ‘updated Protestant work ethic’ offered rewards both for individuals and for the nation as a whole, in the form of tax cuts and increases in public ...”

“... as if they were going to up-end the two-party system, with Perot leading George H.W. Bush and Bill Clinton in the midsummer polls. In 1996, Pat Buchanan (‘The peasants are coming with pitchforks’) appealed to the same bloc of voters with a programme that was militantly Christian, white, nativist, provincial, protectionist and anti-Washington. In ...”

“... But when the votes were counted, it became clear that things weren’t going to plan. Gordon Brown might take some consolation from Cowen’s troubles: he had been barely a month in the job. Whatever hopes Ahern may have cherished that his self-sacrifice would be rewarded with a plum EU position disappeared. The Lisbon vote revealed a striking distrust ...”

“... seems to have begun in 1974 in Time was away: The World of Louis MacNeice, edited by Terence Brown and Alec Reid, but at that stage it was a tentative thing. Indeed, Derek Mahon’s essay in that book, ‘MacNeice in England and Ireland’, mentioned the matter only to set it aside. ‘He had no place in the intellectual history of modern ...”

“... despite seeing so much? The controversy and protests that followed the fatal shooting of Michael Brown, an unarmed 18-year-old, in Ferguson, Missouri, in 2014 exposed the lack of official data on police killings. Two newspapers launched investigations. The Fatal Force, a database maintained by the Washington Post, records ‘every fatal shooting by a police ...”

“... at a paltry £100 advance, demanding to know what his agent will do about it and receiving a bill for £10 commission by the next morning’s post by way of answer. Agency, as the latest shop to set up in the book trade, automatically attracts sneers – sneers, of course, once directed at the ‘tradesman’ publisher. Watson relates a Johnsonian ...”

“... Russia led to a rapid rise in European gas prices. Ed Miliband, then energy secretary under Gordon Brown, went on the Today programme to reassure listeners that Britain had a ‘diverse range of sources where our gas comes from, which is the most important thing this dispute teaches us’. By this he meant gas entered Britain from the North Sea fields and on ...”

“... married Churchill some thought that Venetia and Winston might make a match. She had long brown hair, a deep plummy voice, and was later said by Isaiah Berlin, who met her in Cambridge in the 1930s, to be a ‘handsome, smart, awful woman’. Whatever Venetia’s other callings – in middle age she took up aviation, and she had a passion for keeping ...”