“... implications: a ‘resolve … to be done with utopian illusions and heady expectations’, as Philip Rahv put it. In fact, Ellison was only done with the first of these. Freedom had ceased to be a historical ‘necessity’ but remained a personal ‘possibility’, while the concerns of racial equality or ‘race consciousness’ were replaced by ...”

“... sharply towards a hard Brexit. And she did so without consulting her cabinet. Her chancellor, Philip Hammond, listened to her declare at the Tory Party Conference in October 2016 that after Brexit, Britain would accept no European laws, would take control of its own immigration policy, would have its own trade deal with the EU and would be outside the ...”

“... much she could have said to them, but she had met T.S. Eliot, too, and there was Priestley and Philip Larkin and even Ted Hughes, to whom she’d taken a bit of a shine but who remained nonplussed in her presence. And it was because she had at that time read so little of what they had written that she could not find anything to say and they, of course, had ...”

“... were imported, and soon fed a brisk black market. The puritanical Welsh photographer Philip Jones Griffiths recorded this cheerful materialism in his classic Vietnam Inc.* These opulent Little Americas were soon surrounded by bars, brothels and laundries, ample cover for infiltrators with explosives and wire-cutters. For the first time the ...”

“... But what can you say about your own life to someone on the brink of theirs? I didn’t cry when Philip died either. I’d seen him shrivel into a brown husk, the taut dry skin stretched over his skeleton like a mummified body excavated from some desert tomb. I’d seen him in his wheelchair with an oxygen mask clamped to his face, his eyes rotating ...”