“... therefore became, so to speak, theatrical squared. Their situation also made them competitive. As Michael Young was to point out in The Rise of the Meritocracy, élites based on education lack the security of the old aristocracies of land and money. To live by one’s wits is a nervous business: every younger brain, each new foot on the educational ladder, is ...”

“... unofficial covert agents, her use of which during the miners’ strike is now widely known. So is Michael Heseltine’s shameless abuse of his secret powers over the Belgrano affair and against CND. In his case, the whistleblowers, Clive Ponting and Cathy Massiter, can be seen as representing the older, honourable order, protesting against ...”

“... national interests were at stake – after all, the President’s credibility was on the line. As Michael Ignatieff argues in Hard Choices, Washington was spurred to action over Bosnia, too, not by the ‘CNN factor’ itself but by the way this translated into a question of leadership: For three years, a small constituency pounded away at the shame of ...”

“... the mother asked: ‘Where are my father’s books?’ Gaby Aldor wrote a play, The Lane of White Chairs, about an Arab house in Jaffa to which Taher, a Palestinian refugee, returned from his Jordanian exile. ‘He came in with a burst of anger, as if he were continuing an argument cut off a short while ago,’ Gaby wrote. ‘But the argument was ...”

“... Paul Lauter’s revisionist Heath Anthology of American Literature (1990) and Myra Jehlen and Michael Warner’s English Literatures of America (1996), but they do so in diametrically opposed ways. The new Norton turns outward to include a staggering array of post-colonial writers, from Chinua Achebe to Alice Munro to Les Murray. (None of the ten ...”

“... dying horses and abandoned children. In The Element of Crime (1984), a ravaged cop called Fisher (Michael Elphick) struggles through a flooded landscape, trying to solve a crime. Fisher is a particularly bad detective: he has an affair with a prostitute who turns out to have been the lover of the murderer he is trying to find, then he accidentally murders the ...”

“... men distributed dry sticks of olive wood to dip into a barrel of fire. In Arabic and English, white banners proclaimed ‘Jerusalem is also holy for Palestinians’ and ‘History repeats itself: yesterday Nero, today Sharon.’ Torches alight and banners aloft, the marchers sang the anthem of the American civil rights movement, ‘We Shall ...”

“... by the former Conservative Party chairman Ben Elliot. Starmer’s former chief of staff, Sam White, went to Flint Global, where his boss is James Purnell, who served as a minister under Gordon Brown. Flint claims to offer its clients – which include Meta, Amazon and Uber – ‘unparalleled insight into how Labour thinks and works’. The former home ...”

“... all along; others diagnose a peculiar combination of 1970s New York swamp politics and Southern white supremacy. One thing is beyond dispute: recent months have seen an extraordinary concentration of executive power and an unprecedented weakening, perhaps the outright destruction, of what US civics textbooks once touted as a robust separation of powers. A ...”

“... but cappuccino and croissants smell better than diesel fumes, and polished terrazzo flooring and white-enamelled steel have more appeal than sooty brick and the brownish, magnetised dust from cast-iron brake blocks that formerly clung to every metal surface. After all, railways never set out to be ‘atmospheric’, but to perform a valuable and profitable ...”

“... many suggestions he made that evening was that, when I was in Dublin again, I should go and see Michael Yeats, the son of the poet, who might be glad to meet someone who was interested in his grandfather as much as his father – and to spend time with someone who was brought up, as I was, in a Fianna Fáil family (Fianna Fáil being at the time the main ...”

“... smile to herself and sit back again.’ When George’s daughter Anne was born in 1919 and son Michael in 1921, the sisters became enthusiastic babysitters and general chroniclers of their brother’s household. ‘I think George enjoys the thrill she gets when she gives her name in shops,’ Lolly wrote. ‘Mrs W.B. Yeats.’ Lily thought her ...”

“... the floor of a Dominican church. Among the gravestones was a particularly striking one in grey-white marble with pink and blue veins. Two helmets with slits for eyes faced each other, like a pair of beaky dolphins about, clangingly, to kiss: ‘Tomb Slab of an English Couple’, the label in Istanbul’s Archaeological Museum says. The couple were ...”

“... Love, who merged Eastern mysticism with psychonaut politics and heavy-duty illegality. Chasing the white light and the dark sun. Chasing the memory of a high that will never be recaptured. John Milius’s wistful Big Wednesday (1978), set between 1962 and 1974, tracks the difficult transition to adulthood of three young surfers. Offscreen, two of the film’s ...”

“... was ‘a call for a return to the 1950s’. The mock-arcadia of its ending, returning to the white picket fence of the opening but with everything slightly off, leaves us in little doubt that the dream and the nightmare inhabit each other. Jeffrey and Frank are two halves of a whole: MacLachlan’s boyish face sometimes flickers with dead-eyed ...”