“... nadir of postwar Britain. David Cameron (though it could just as easily have been Gordon Brown) read out the charge sheet at a Demos meeting in 2006: ‘economic decline . . . inflation, stagnation and rising unemployment . . . deteriorating industrial relations’. Nearly 30 million working days were lost to strikes in 1979, mainly during the Winter of ...”

“... and quickly took root in the public imagination. But it also set some eyes rolling. Richard Dawkins and Stephen Jay Gould were critical, and scientists across the board argued that Gaia smacked of teleology or even new-age mysticism. Can we really say a planet is an organism? What if life just evolves and there’s nothing that actually ...”

“... This astonishing and brilliant revival of independence and creative energy is the subject of Richard Butterwick’s book. For Catherine, though, as for the Habsburg emperor and the Prussian king, this resurrection was insufferable. In 1795 the armies of all three tramped in to carry out the last of the late 18th-century partitions of the Commonwealth and ...”

“... honour containing those – Hélène Carrière d’Encausse, Robert Conquest, Zbigniew Brzezinski, Richard Pipes – who did see the fuse peeping out from the foundations and said as much. Indeed, a whole issue (Spring 1993) of the conservative US journal National Interest was largely devoted to a celebration of the Right’s greater prescience in perceiving ...”

“... and cover a few boos, with a rendition of ‘Congratulations’, a song once sung by Cliff Richard to remind people that happiness is a feeling constantly under threat from the songs that celebrate it. ‘Beautiful white dress,’ the woman from the BBC said. ‘Hardly white,’ the person beside me said. ‘She’s got two huge children.’ ‘It ...”

“... takes me aback by talking to me not about financial regulation but about having been assigned to read my book Relative Deprivation and Social Justice when he was an undergraduate. What, he asks, am I writing now? I tell him I have just published a long-gestated volume about the sociology of 20th-century England. What I don’t tell him is that it ...”

“... like this.’ But the paradoxical gusto and linguistic inventiveness of the writing (judging by Richard Lourie’s confident translation), and its rapid and always disconcerting shuffling of tones (lyrical, affectionate, snide, farcical, grumpy, bitter), manage to prevent our feeling as with André Brink that postures are being adopted in careful conformity ...”

“... church. A mile or so beyond looms a larger sight that Rodinsky was spared: the 52 floors of Richard Seifert’s Natwest Tower, double-decker lifts, automatic window-washing facilities and all. Here again was the characteristic frisson of the zone of transition, where different worlds rub up against one another, languages intersect on every corner and ...”

“... proprietor of the small yet reliable magazine Antichrist. This Ravelston – some composite of Sir Richard Rees and John Middleton Murry – was a hedonistic yet guilt-ridden dilettante, good in a pinch, and soft on poets, but too easily embarrassed by brute exigence. Saul Bellow – who has already shown a vulnerability to exigent poets in his wonderful ...”

“... Yoghurt? No. Pizza? Don’t be stupid. Keen’s cheddar? Perfect. Then I went upstairs and read Emmanuel Carrère’s biography of Philip K. Dick for half an hour or so.† Then I tried to sleep. There are quite a large number of books about how to get a good night’s sleep, and good ‘sleep hygiene’ in general, and not a single one of them ...”

“... to become governing rhetoric.At the office one morning at the end of August, I was approached by Richard Johnson, the editor of the New York Post’s gossip column, Page Six. Every day, a photocopied packet of the gossip columns from the national and local papers was prepared by the interns at George. This was one way to keep up with public versions of ...”

“... exists to render the idea of competition redundant. Like so many others in Silicon Valley, Thiel read Ayn Rand’s Atlas Shrugged as a young man and continues to pursue her ideal of the fearless businessman who is prepared to take no prisoners in creating something new. The condition of progress is to change the rules of the game. For that reason, Thiel ...”

“... Karl Ove had prematurely creamed at my entrance. (Don’t worry, we’re safe here: he doesn’t read reviews.)What does the star interrupt? Do people know that they are in the Bible? From the changed sky, modest plagues descend. Turid sees freaky birds with human heads sail through the air; crabs in their hundreds cover the roads; Egil finds a shed skin, as ...”

“... new wave of furious proselytising for atheism (which includes not just Hitchens but people like Richard Dawkins and Daniel Dennett) is just another surrogate religion is a familiar one. It’s what the God-botherers always say about the God-bashers. But in the case of Christopher Hitchens it’s not entirely convincing. The ...”

“... took an interest in literary criticism, history and philosophy as well as society gossip. Richard Steele, the magazine’s editor and a friend of Swift’s, puffed the poet and his work in an introduction. This new writer, he said, deserved to be read and admired because he had ‘run into a Way perfectly new, and ...”