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“... of his own society as being the product of a ‘seven-hundred-year process’: Guizot and Saint-Simon also traced the origins of modernity back to the medieval past, and considered history a power ‘superior to man’. Despite Zunz’s attempts to argue otherwise, what set Tocqueville apart was his ambivalence about the direction of history. He might have ...”

“... and there is no democratic representation in the running of the school, hospital or town hall. A doctor living in the town explains: I’d rather live in a civil than a political society. Here we have a contract with TCC that defines our property rights, and we are not frustrated by bureaucrats with their own agenda. I don’t have a contract with ...”

“... constant pressure over performance. He immediately pinched a couple of people from Network Rail: Simon Kirby, who was in charge of major projects (including huge station renewals at Birmingham, Reading and London Bridge), and Tom Kelly, a communications strategist versed in the dark arts – he was Alistair Campbell’s successor at Number Ten. Higgins ...”

“... four pockets, and John Cage copies a star-atlas onto music paper. In the messier room across the hall, Karlheinz Stockhausen untunes a synthesiser, while William Burroughs randomly folds and cuts up his prose, and Robert Rauschenberg pushes a stuffed goat through an old tyre. That all these are denatured versions of Modernist practice is something ...”

“... Its projection of ‘Cool Britannia’ failed. The popular culture it referred to, as Stuart Hall pointed out, was ‘too “multicultural” and too “Black British” or “Asian crossover” or “British hybrid” for New Labour’s more sober, corporate-managerialist English style’. The only alternative was populist nationalism. In 2010, Gavin ...”

“... Actually, this fly-pitched outlaw, spotted on the side of a telephone junction box outside Toynbee Hall, on Commercial Street in Whitechapel, had been got up to look like a charity case, or a Wanted poster. Dead or alive. ‘Vote Michael Moorcock’, it said. ‘King of the City’. King of the City, a hefty London novel, character-packed, busy with competing ...”

“... scale’. (In 1999, both Springsteen and the E Street Band were elected into the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame.) In 1975, the success of their third album, Born to Run – six million copies sold in the US alone – put Springsteen on the cover of both Newsweek (‘Making of a Rock Star’) and Time (‘Rock’s New Sensation’). By then he had defined his ...”

“... in front of a wildly enthusiastic crowd of 13,000. Marine Le Pen could only dream of filling a hall that big. Jean-Luc Mélenchon, the leading candidate of the left, held a rally at the same time, also in the Paris suburbs, and attracted an audience a third of the size. There were many more young people – most of them men (and many maskless) – at ...”

“... like silence,’ it begins) was released in 1965, on Bringing It All Back Home, the same year as Simon and Garfunkel’s ‘Sound of Silence’, which includes the line: ‘The words of the prophets are written on the subway walls.’ I don’t know which was written first, or if they were written quite independently, and it doesn’t matter – after ...”

“... one more film in Spain (Tristana, 1970), two more films in Mexico (The Exterminating Angel, 1962, Simon of the Desert, 1965), and six films in France (Diary of a Chambermaid, 1964, Belle de jour, 1966, The Milky Way, 1969, The Discreet Charm of the Bourgeoisie, 1972, The Phantom of Liberty, 1974, That Obscure Object of Desire, 1977).Viridiana has a number of ...”

“... which has almost no money, virtually no formal responsibilities and sits in an 18th-century town hall on the high street. Powell was the lesser mayor, and it rankled. It still does. Being mayor number two, he had to stand behind the borough mayor at municipal events. ‘The second-fiddle aspects,’ he said, as he drove me back from Witts’s house. ‘They ...”

“... belonging to, for example, Peter Ackroyd, Anita Brookner, William Boyd, Anthony Burgess and Peter Hall. This is typical, alas. First repetition: Kenneth has left Paris, even though his father has promised to introduce him to the ‘agent who had forced Tsvetaeva’s husband to work for the GPU’. Kenneth prefers the Midwest because ‘that’s where the ...”

“... Hellman accepts the offer. All then is giddy alacrity. Like Jane Eyre setting off for Thornfield Hall, or the excitable governess departing for Bly at the opening of The Turn of the Screw, Mahoney promptly leaves her parents’ house in dreary Milton, Massachusetts, and heads for the sun-dappled Vineyard, revelling in fantasies about the marvellous ...”

“... a bang, but the rest knew nothing until, about twenty minutes later, Mr Kebede appeared in the hall in his stockinged feet, saying there was a fire in his flat. He thought it had started at the back of his fridge. He called the police before going to the door of his next-door neighbour, Maryam Adam, who was three months pregnant. ‘It was exactly 12.50 ...”

“... you say about him, you say about yourself. ‘The whole corpus of Robespierre studies is a hall of mirrors,’ Mark Cumming says in his piece in this volume. Intending only to look at Robespierre, we see ourselves with our own startled eyes, starved or gross, inflated or diminished. Carlyle’s ‘thin lean Puritan and Precision’ scuttles forever ...”