“... I had the key to the secret garden.’ If Still in a Dream strikes a melancholy note, it may have something to do with Reynolds’s fear that this work was in vain. MP3s, streaming and algorithmic recommendations have all contributed to pop music’s fading from the front line of youth culture. Songs have been free at the point of use for more than ...”

“... to documents had diminished his value to Moscow.Why MI6 used him remains an open question. It may be that both London and Elliott genuinely believed he was innocent and that he was too valuable a resource to leave unused. But in 1956, MI6 acquired a new chief, Dick White, who had long suspected that Philby was playing a double game. It’s possible that ...”

“... features of the West is that its champions worry it will wither away.While the historical West may have been constituted by Latin Europe and Britain, along with their colonial offshoots, many promoters of the West today seem to think of it as a club that can sign up new members, including eligible liberal democracies such as Taiwan, South Korea and what ...”

“... the precursors, all the previous attempts to solve the problem.’ ‘Back in 1997 there was Tim May’s BlackNet …’ May was a crypto-anarchist, who had been operating and agitating in the cypherpunk community since the mid-1980s. ‘Computer technology is on the verge of providing the ability for individuals and ...”

“... its dying day. In this debacle, the party’s conduct was without international excuse. Revolution may have been ruled out in postwar Italy, but by 1946 the Allies had essentially left the country, and were in no position to halt a lustration of Fascism. Togliatti’s naivety in being so completely outmanoeuvred by De Gasperi had little to do with external ...”

“... to the ground. Hence people born when I was, towards the end of April or in the first weeks of May, are home-lovers, green-fingered, deeply conservative, routine-loving, inexorable, well-throated, prone to kidney disorders, peasants. On the other hand, we are also ‘ruled’ by the planet the Greeks called ‘Aphrodite’, which means Venus is anciently ...”

“... the world of ‘my mother’s taste’. My whole life up to now – as even the slow-witted reader may have deduced – has from one angle been a fairly heartless repudiation of maternal sentimentality: all the bright, powerless, feminine things. Now especially, her world is largely one of kitty cats, splashy floral bedspreads and pillow shams, Mrs See’s ...”

“... support, in turn rejecting the Taliban. To that end, the British ambassador has just said that we may be here for thirty years. I started mentioning this idea and got scorn or sarcasm from the soldiers every time. One lieutenant colonel even said that if I found any of the Foreign Office or Development people in charge of all this reconstruction, would I ...”

“... either criterion makes you insolvent. It is a criminal offence to trade while insolvent. There may be a get-out, however. Are you really insolvent? I’ve made things clear-cut for the purposes of this example, but you could argue – and in comparable cases people do argue – that your problem is not so much insolvency as illiquidity. Liquidity is the ...”

“... and went out. Five minutes later she was back with a cup of tea. ‘No sugar,’ said Midgley. ‘May I?’ she said and put both lumps in her mouth. ‘Slack tonight,’ she said. ‘Still, it just needs one drunken driver.’ Midgley closed his eyes. ‘I thought you were going to be a bit of company,’ she said. ‘You’re tired out.’ She fetched a ...”

“... self presented it as a hideous, just-about-unenterable opposite state. (The hard drinking that may have helped precipitate it leaves another blank in the record.) It is as if his ‘seething’ consciousness had now split, hard upon his hour of ‘good fortune’: the axe-blow of it left him – and in turn, his eloquence leaves the reader – achingly ...”

“... are worse because they do not have a traditional electorate which will support them come what may. Since we are to vote for or against it in a referendum, it is worth trying to calculate what would have happened under the simple Alternative Vote (AV) system – not the same as AV+, which has a proportional component and is less likely to be adopted. This ...”

“... practical, accident-avoiding activity – is some sense of the wrongness of any given thing that may go wrong: the tolerability of its consequences, the trade-off between the costs of an accident and the costs of avoiding the accident. The lessons Schlosser means us to draw from Command and Control address some, but not all, of these qualifications. The ...”

“... was a possibility of alleviating suffering, even bringing about an improvement. Their liberalism may well have been theoretically at the service of repressive Foucauldian power, protecting the status quo, but in practice they offered some chance of treating people decently and giving them a space to exist when they feel they can’t. When in the 20th ...”

“... was much too expensive to fall into the hands of the discontented poor – and of a novel that may be the first ‘thriller’, and a genuinely thrilling one, The Adventures of Caleb Williams. In the atmosphere of the great show trials of 1794, Thelwall’s among them, Godwin worried that Caleb Williams, with its unflattering picture of ‘things as they ...”