“... strategy’ from the specificities of Gramsci’s ‘Italian dilemma’. One of Nairn’s first major publications was an English translation of Giuseppe Fiori’s biography of Gramsci in 1970, which revealed in new detail his struggles against poverty, sickness, fascism and imprisonment, as well as enemies on his own side. Nairn’s Gramsci was a ‘man of ...”

“... opens with a brisk pair of essays by David Fallow and Michael Wood on the subject of his parents: John Shakespeare, born in about 1530, the son of a tenant farmer in the outlying village of Snitterfield, and Mary née Arden, some years younger, of a more prosperous family from Wilmcote. Neither of their baptisms is documented, nor the date of their ...”

“... struggle. How much a matter of choice this is will be clear to anyone who glances at the other major study of the Attlee era to appear recently, Kenneth Morgan’s Labour in Power 1945-51, which does find room for the passions and personalities of the period. That Pelling has chosen not to write this kind of history shows where he stands in the contest ...”

“... in the House of Commons, delivered on 1 February 1887, is a wickedly witty indictment of both the major parties, and again is still startlingly relevant. His 1908 article on ‘The Real Equality of the Sexes’ makes most modern articles on sexual equality seem cheap and childish. And, to single out one more of the political pieces included in Dr Watts’s ...”

“... situations, often having used his wealth to make them happen. In 1931, he was the first to publish John Betjeman, who had been a fellow student at Oxford. In 1933 he financed the final collaboration between Bertolt Brecht and Kurt Weill. When Salvador Dalí was nearly suffocated by the diving suit he wore to the International Surrealist Exhibition in London in ...”

“... in domestic affairs. By naming Wall Street first even so, he draws attention to the continuity of major decisions made inside the White House by officials whose provenance or destination was the firm of Goldman Sachs. This pattern has held true from the Bill Clinton to the George W. Bush to the Obama presidency, and it explains why radical critics like Cornel ...”

“... particularly well in a series of drawings of the Madonna and Child, sometimes with the infant St John, made in the preparation of some of his best-known pictures, in which the children are endowed with an agility and poise quite incongruous for their supposed age but perhaps justifiable on the grounds of their divine status. It was in Rome, where Raphael ...”

“... the ‘deeper thinkers’ of the 1870s, carrying forward the social conscience of Dickens, while John Everett Millais, no less than his French homonym, possessed a manner affectingly and ‘personally intimate’.In chasing the works that Van Gogh looked at in London, the Tate exhibition takes us on some journeys in taste. It is easy enough to be stirred by ...”

“... to make room for the growing number of press attendees. Or of the lowlier ones at least: each major news organisation is allocated a few blue badges that permit entry into the courtroom itself, and the senior figures grab them. It’s nice to learn who is the biggest wig at the BBC and who ignores whom, and nice to watch the ITN team huddle on the steps ...”

“... billboard ads appeared on many buildings, not only in Shanghai but in Beijing, Guangzhou and most major cities in China. The media, including the cultural TV channels, went to town on the book – and Dai – and there was an international symposium on Finnegans Wake at last year’s Shanghai Book Fair, feeding yet another round of media frenzy. With such a ...”

“... on each of these days 20,000 people were unable to receive their scheduled supply. According to John Ging, the director of UNRWA in Gaza, most of the people who get food aid are entirely dependent on it. On 18 December UNRWA suspended all food distribution for both emergency and regular programmes because of the blockade. The WFP has had similar ...”

“... feel the lack of a clear definition. Tantra isn’t a religion, but it profoundly transformed two major religions, Hinduism and Buddhism. It isn’t about sex, but it’s shot through with sexuality. Its practitioners range from hucksterish wandering mystics to kings, from celibate monks to rock stars. Scholars frequently point to the word’s etymology ...”

“... and in New York, Dia was funded by his wife, Philippa de Menil, daughter of Dominique de Menil, a major patron and heir to the Schlumberger fortune (made from drill bits for oil wells). Along with a third collaborator, a young art historian called Helen Winkler, Friedrich and de Menil saw that this new work had opened a structural gap in the art world ...”

“... port, Chilean wine and so forth. One of the number could never get enough of the joke. This was John Braine, whose special party-trick was the skipping of ironic bits. When he said that England these days was run by the trade unions and the pansies, he meant it. When he went on about treason and the intellectuals there was grim, literal relish in his ...”

“... to know. He is often very funny. There are hilarious set-pieces at the expense of, for example, John Braine and Paul Johnson. For the Sake of Argument is not an easy book to précis. There are eight parts and 72 essays, the allocation of which is somewhat random. Most of the pieces in ‘Rogues’ Gallery’, for instance, could go equally well into ...”