“... underwent further, critical changes in the 1980s, with the rise of small export firms and a black economy – the ‘second Italian miracle’, as it was hopefully referred to at the time – the party was unprepared again, and this time the blow to its standing as the political representative of the collective labourer proved fatal. Twenty years ...”

“... especially in America, where Israeli propaganda seems to lead a life of its own. Whereas, in 1975, Michael Adams and Christopher Mayhew were able to write about a coherent but unstated policy of unofficial British press censorship, according to which unpleasant truths about Zionism were systematically suppressed, the situation is not nearly as obvious so far ...”

“... for languages or football: because it’s beautiful. I have no idea what stars were rising when Michael Wood’s The Road to Delphi: The Life and Afterlife of Oracles pushed onto the planet’s surface, but so brainy a book must have a lot of air signs in its chart. It seems at first to have been born under the sign of Aquarius: analytical, determinedly ...”

“... such embarrassing things as the very high murder rate in the US, its hugely disproportionate black prison population, persistent illiteracy and significant levels of political corruption. Even so, there is no doubt in my mind that my experience as a graduate student unconsciously prepared me for later comparative work. My duties as a teaching assistant ...”

“... shelves like a university course: Laing, David Stafford-Clark, Erving Goffman, Vance Packard, Michael Argyle, C.J. Adcock, Viktor Frankl. And more and more. They were all over the house, on tables, on the floor. She bought them, I bought them, Peter and his friends bought them. Somehow they were cheap enough for the smallest allowance. All these were read ...”

“... and shows how much autonomy could exist within the organisation. Vázquez-Pacheco, a Black Puerto Rican born in New York City, made the transition from audience member at meetings to visibility in the simplest way, by noticing that the person writing information on a whiteboard had an illegible hand, and taking over with his own neat ...”

“... on what look suspiciously like extrajudicial executions, faute de mieux, after shuttering Bush’s black sites and deciding not to send anyone else to Guantánamo, where approximately a third of the hundred detainees on hunger strike are receiving a macabre form of Obamacare through tubes in their noses. Mazzetti adds, as a second unspoken and perhaps ...”

“... September. The schools were coming out. The boys and girls in their neat uniforms looked happy: black, Asian and white children laughing and chatting together. But a subjective impression of happiness is not much use to political engineers. I tried to see St Albans not only through my own senses but through the apprehension of the people trying to secure ...”

“... teabag nestled in a bouquet of patriotic souvenirs – a red double-decker bus, an old-fashioned black cab, an old-fashioned red phone box, a Big Ben. Threatening this pot-pourri of Englishness was a clenched fist, blue like the European flag, tattooed with a ring of yellow European stars. The Brexiteers’ strategy was successful, and not only in winning ...”

“... criticised: ‘You are here to study pandas, not golden monkeys’ – or Takin bulls, or Asiatic black bears, or rock squirrels, or to note minor ecological occurrences within the habitat of the panda, all of which he could not help doing. The Chinese also objected to foreigners collecting specimens (scientific imperialism), and Schaller became convinced ...”

“... which to oversee executive discretion, a task that the courts here already have well in hand, as Michael Howard and other ministers would be the first angrily to testify. This is not the prize that most advocates of the Convention are after. What excites them is the notion that after incorporation the judiciary would be able to strike down Parliamentary ...”

“... social disaggregation at home. Nor were such warning signs confined to the White House. Persisting black-white antagonisms were aggravated by Hispanic and other immigrations, and by gnawing disquiet about elites, privatisation, and the loss of class and other communities. The weird non-election of 2000 ended by placing a question mark over the greatest ...”

“... is intended to make all the women who don’t conform to that image – because they are poorer or black or their lives are just more humanly complicated – feel like total failures.3 This has the added advantage of letting a government whose austerity policy has disproportionately targeted women and mothers completely off the hook. ‘Parenthood is not a ...”

“... with swallows skimming low over the tops and it feels like a scene from the 1940s. It could be a Michael Powell film or a page from the diaries of Denton Welch. This isn’t wholly imagination either, as it turns out that there was a camp here during the war for American airborne troops, which makes the survival of these wonderfully elaborate pillars, still ...”

“... amateur snaps, is a necrophile’s delight: photograph after photograph, in tiny, eye-straining black and white, of crosses, graves, plaques, inscriptions, bombed-out block-houses converted into monuments, decaying trench relics, dank rows of cypresses, grassed-over mine and shell craters, obscene-looking barrows, and yet more crosses and graves. Some of ...”