“... suburbs that surrounded it and had taken on its name. Though they poured right up to the gates of Hanmouth, they were obviously the city’s, Barnstaple’s, suburbs, not Hanmouth’s. Hanmouth could never have suburbs.’ A whiff of mystery and potential horror is almost enough to override the genteel town’s distaste, at least for a while. There ...”

“... corrupted’ is a significant use of tense. In Kimball’s analysis, the enemy is within the gates; the damage has been done and undoing it will be a bloody business. ‘It is no secret,’ he tells us, ‘that the academic study of the humanities in this country is in a state of crisis. Proponents of deconstruction, feminist studies, and other ...”

“... the granaries of words like breasts’, ‘Who would have thought it? At the White Gates/She let them do whatever they liked’), or the customary brew of voyeurism and Catholicism:The white towelling bathrobeungirdled, the hair still wet,first coldness of the underbreastlike a ciborium in the ...”

“... with a glancing nod to Rilke, no caged old panther I, Pacing my madness. These muttered words Are gates, not bars, where only I can pass. The first edition of his translations appeared in 1943 when Hamburger was 19; in subsequent editions he has altered old translations, added new ones and repeatedly rewritten his introduction. The new edition, based ...”

“... Empire stretched from the Persian Gulf in the south to the Balkans in the north and reached the gates of Vienna in 1683. Then came the long ebb, as the Turks retreated from Europe and others competed to replace them. One power in particular had grown rapidly in importance. The small medieval principality of Muscovy had expanded hugely: Russia reached the ...”

“... Wide Web made its first appearance. The period is encapsulated by the excruciating video of Bill Gates and his colleagues dancing on stage at Microsoft’s Windows 1995 launch, the equally cringeworthy video of the entire Democratic National Convention doing the ‘macarena’ a year later (both are on YouTube), or the sitcom Friends, in which ...”

“... undertakers hover in their closing pages), then at least from the crystal set to iPlayer. David Hendy’s book has the strengths of an insider’s account, packed with detail and anecdotes, shrewd in its assessment of personalities, light on socioeconomic change. Simon Potter’s is more academic and astringent. Potter tends to be critical where Hendy ...”

“... valley’s first major firm, Hewlett-Packard, was a military contractor. One of its co-founders, David Packard, was an undersecretary of defence in the Nixon administration; his signal contribution as a civil servant was a paper about overriding the laws preventing the imposition of martial law. Many defence contractors have flourished in Silicon Valley in ...”

“... and its immobilisation in infrastructure – a ‘spatial fix’, in the words of the geographer David Harvey – is one progenitor of Xi’s grand initiative. China’s treatment by the US is another.In October 2011, Obama’s then secretary of state, Hillary Clinton, announced the birth of ‘America’s Pacific Century’ in an article for Foreign ...”

“... North are eco-lodge versions of Kafka’s Committee of Affairs, or the banal halls of the IRS in David Foster Wallace’s The Pale King – populated by Systems GuysTM and characterised by morbid bureaucracy. One small gripe is that Beauman doesn’t allow us to spend enough time in any of these places to get a proper sense of them. The most intriguing stop ...”

“... what Mr Hattersley thinks they ought to think), and in spite of a few ritual swipes at the SDP and David Owen, there is nothing in the book to preclude the idea of a Labour-Alliance coalition after the next election. But there is, in fact, one troublesome matter. Mr Hattersley denounces with passion and eloquence the appalling way that – despite the ...”

“... to work, poor people gave more of themselves to leisure, and it was thought almost holy that Bill Gates earned more than the lowest-paid 40 per cent of Americans combined. ‘Once,’ Thomas Frank writes in his terrific book One Market under God :2 Americans imagined that economic democracy meant a reasonable standard of living for all – that freedom was ...”

“... case was promoted by the governor of the principality: Lord Keith, a Jacobite exile and friend of David Hume and James Boswell. Rousseau could hardly have been more fortunate in his protector. For Keith was no longer a fiery Catholic enthusiast for lost causes but a good-natured sceptic, who enjoyed Rousseau’s company, and was not unduly put out by his ...”

“... On​ 7 May 1918, a man in Royal Flying Corps uniform presented himself at the gates of the Kremlin, claiming to be the personal emissary of the British prime minister, David Lloyd George, and demanding an audience with Lenin. He was persuasive enough to be let in and managed to talk his way as far as the chairman’s secretary, if not all the way to Lenin himself ...”

“... Exchange Building. In 1993, one man, George Heron, had been acquitted of her murder; now another, David Boyd, was about to stand trial.In 1992, Sunderland’s shipyards had closed down, Monkwearmouth colliery was about to be mothballed and, though Liebherr cranes still tilted their long necks across the docks, and Nissan was mass-producing Primeras and Micras ...”