“... This book, by a man who at 35 was already called ‘a legend in American journalism’, is a lengthy and anecdotal analysis of the transactions between political power in the United States during the last fifty years and the power of the mass media. The latter are exemplified for Halberstam by four conglomerates of the American communications industry, each more or less in the control of a single family: the Columbia Broadcasting System (CBS), created and run by William Paley; Time Inc, including Life, owned by Henry Luce; the Washington Post and Newsweek, run by Philip and then by Kay Graham; and the Chandler family’s Los Angeles Times ...”

“... process, the first portrayer of society in terms that Adam Smith might and Karl Marx did approve. David Brown makes the academic case admirably. He begins by modestly disclaiming originality: he is developing insights put forward by others in recent years, and only applying them more ...”

“... The refutation of utilitarianism, and its replacement by some new and comprehensive alternative, has become one of the major Anglo-American growth industries. The problem of how to live with a liberal and mildly interventionist state if we no longer accept the premisses upon which such a state was originally founded has rightly exercised philosophers on both sides of the Atlantic, though it is striking how difficult it has proved for them fully to disentangle themselves from the old ways of thinking ...”

“... nation state in the way post-Revolutionary France often tried to do. This does not mean the UK can be regarded merely as a multinational state, or (pace some post-colonialist commentators) as an English-constructed empire. Instead, the UK has most closely resembled what the Columbia political scientist Alfred Stepan styles a ‘state-nation’. Like many other ...”

“... on hospitals. Health Maintenance Organisations (HMOs), the forerunners of ACOs, were pioneered by the US health insurance provider Kaiser Permanente in 1953. President Nixon’s adviser John Ehrlichman explained to his boss the basic concept before the passage of the 1973 HMO Act: ‘The less care they give them the more money they make.’ In May 2016 ...”

“... most polls done over the last fifty years) of its representativeness. This representativeness can be defined in two broad ways. One is constitutional. The monarchy survived the critiques of 19th-century radicals not because of any political skill of its own but because the state – of which it was the leading symbol – purified and liberalised itself ...”

“... African labour market,’ Charles van Onselen writes in New Nineveh, ‘has always been dominated by … mining, agriculture and domestic service.’ Van Onselen’s two-volume history of ‘everyday life in the Witwatersrand’, a long ridge on the Highveld, explores the period from the mid-1880s when the discovery of gold propelled South Africa through a ...”

“... of the 19th and 20th centuries, the authors deal, not with the global issues envisaged by Pugin but with the careers of famous (and, in one case, not-so-famous) architects. The history of architecture, we are asked to believe, is the history of the individuals whose names appeared on architectural drawings. The justification for this biographical ...”

“... adroitly restricted to an account of four visits. The first two, at intervals of a year, are paid by Daniel Francoeur, an American writer long resident in London, to his aging parents in Rhode Island. He finds them unhappy, constrained by repressed hostility and old disappointments. His mother, now an invalid who confines ...”

“... no worse than the old-fashioned Catholic Right: perhaps better, if the fate of Garcia Lorca be considered, for he was safe when being looked after in the house of fascists, and betrayed to his death by a Catholic ex-deputy. The Republic certainly did retain the services of men of integrity, to the end, but the shadow ...”

“... just go on parading their mutual distrust until it has become a way of life, and neither side will be satisfied until it has provoked a world explosion. I humbly think this is a mistake, but there is no limit to the extent of human folly. As to Hungary, it had an obscurantist regime in the days of Regent Horthy and it was a great stroke for Hungary when the ...”

“... The earliest examples come from southern Mesopotamia, and date to the end of the fourth millennium BC. They were used to record economic transactions, and there remained a distinctly mercantile quality to Mesopotamian civilisation throughout its history. Egypt soon followed, with similar ideas but with differing emphasis, since Egyptian writing seems to have ...”

“... Younger Scottish writers seem to be preoccupied by gender. It is a theme crucial equally to Duncan McLean’s novel Bunker Man and to Kathleen Jamie’s poetry collection The Queen of Sheba. It is insistent in W.N. Herbert’s poem ‘Featherhood’ and Janice Galloway’s Foreign Parts ...”

“... then stand-alone Liberal Party more votes (over six million) than Paddy Ashdown achieved for the by now merged Liberal Democrats (five and a quarter million) at the last general election. Discretion, if not sheer political cowardice, decreed that his faintly saturnine presence should be air-brushed out of any contemporary ...”

“... receives packages that contain chunks of his book. He reads articles in magazines that appear to be written by him. Eventually fiction and reality collide in the loo of a Travelodge at the mouth of the Blackwall Tunnel; it isn’t a light moment. Norton meets his reflection, who wanted to shift, the insight came to me, as ...”