“... in Beijing an unprecedented group of works of art (paintings, textiles, porcelain, even a great rock from the imperial gardens), as the tribute of one age of prosperity to another. It would be easy, too, to see some contemporary parallels: the high Qing was an era of the firmest possible central control over the lands of Islamic Central Asia and Tibet; its ...”

“... accepted Boeing’s tender for a massive new cargo aircraft for the United States Air Force, David Lodge would not have been able to write Paradise News. Instead, however, Lockheed got the contract, and Boeing were left with a redundant set of blueprints for the biggest furniture van never built. To save all that development money going to waste, they ...”

“... South Africa through a European-style industrial revolution compressed into twenty years. David Goldblatt (b.1930) began taking photographs in the gold-mining areas in his teens. Many of them, and the ones that followed, tell the story of South Africa’s labouring classes, predominantly black, in a world shaped by race laws and extractive ...”

“... Eighty-six people died in the Waco siege in April, including the ‘prophet’ David Koresh and 17 children fathered by him. David Leppard, a crime reporter with the Sunday Times Insight team who covered the Waco story, describes well and knowledgeably the appalling build-up of weapons in the compound of the Branch Davidians’ ranch and the information and assumptions that led the two law enforcement agencies involved – the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco and Firearms (ATF) and the FBI – to make a series of disastrous errors ...”

“... between performers and audience, with disgruntled folk-music lovers heckling throughout the rock ‘n’ roll sets. ‘He wants shooting,’ fulminates an angry fan in the unreleased film of the tour, Eat the document. But Dylan thrived on exactly this kind of hostility. The most thrilling single moment of his musical career is probably still the ...”

“... tradition of early 20th-century Modern than the cast sculptures (with the startling exception of Rock-Drill). Among these carvings are the doves, of around 1915, which were Epstein’s shot at Brancusi’s kind of abstraction and simplification, and a whole string of allegorical figures. Some owe more than others to his study of non-European ...”

“... watched him playing piano on a bare stage in Cambridge directing a performance of The cradle will rock. In his music-theatre Bernstein followed Blitzstein’s example, greatly echoing the score of Freedom Morning ... for his On the Town of 1944. In his handling of his sexual life. Bernstein also built on Blitzstein’s model, even marrying, as Blitzstein did ...”

“... Caesar’s Death’ makes an ‘utterly Brechtian point’ and that Blitzstein’s The cradle will rock is ‘largely influenced by The Threepenny Opera’. In assessing musical works, Mr Sanders relies on the free play of personal taste and received opinion. The former either lends a semblance of individuality to the latter or in its absence becomes the sole ...”

“... their way, not ours. The prince of this brave new world – and the closest Nips has to a resident rock star – is Demis Hassabis, co-founder and CEO of Google’s DeepMind, best known for having taught an algorithm (AlphaGo) to play the fearsomely demanding game of Go better than any human being has ever managed.* Hassabis is here to talk about his latest ...”

“... a degeneration, Mannerism to Modernism’s High Renaissance, rococo to its baroque (or indeed glam rock to its Beatles). This is the Modernism which flew kites higher in the sky than had ever seemed possible, and the Post-Modernism which cut the strings. The elements which are prefiguratively Post-Modern in Brecht – the use of mosaic and mixed media ...”

“... and running. Laing had founded a group known as the Philadelphia Association along with Esterson, David Cooper, Clancy Sigal and Sid Briskin, and these men formed the core group of loving brothers. The idea had been to find a house in which people could live while in the throes of a psychotic episode, where the process of madness could run its course without ...”

“... 2004 election were pre-planned (exit polls, steward training, the building of a stage for a rock concert in the main square, the erection of six hundred tents), but ‘then so was the fraud that led to them.’ He accepts that Western NGOs advised and helped to organise the protests, but why not? The West was promoting its democratic values, for which ...”

“... positions but ripe for removal; like those who controlled the Light Programme in the years before rock’n’roll. Several novels and short stories have absorbed and portrayed the rave revolution over the years, and now raving is being given a history. There’s no consensus about its origins: to some of the writers discussed here, there’s a clear break ...”

“... Say ‘David Storey’ and readers of my (and his) generation will recall the final shot of This Sporting Life: Frank Machin (Richard Harris), mired, spavined, raising himself on the rugby field to lurch back into hopeless battle. His life as a professional is over. Football chews up its workforce faster even than the pits ...”

“... the Stock-Exchange crash of 1873 that gives him his big break. ‘Select sound stocks and buy at rock-bottom prices’ – acting on his own maxim, Gustav becomes a magnate overnight. He marries Else Dreinach, daughter of a Viennese scholar, and in 1889 completes the building of a vast and vulgar schloss in a suburb of Vienna called Pernsdorf. Else dies ...”