“... Classes consolidate, whites push down on blacks, blue collars are hemmed in by white collars, and grey flannel suits march down city streets lined with offices and banks. Auschwitz may have been a world away from Levittown, but in Hannah Arendt’s vision of totalitarianism – ‘destroying all space between men and pressing men against each ...”

“... whisper used to thrill through crowded churches, when every breath was held to hear; that calm grey eye; those features, so stern, and yet so gentle! Was it the spirit of Frederick Mornington? Mornington was John Henry Newman; and Froude wrote his History in order to save himself and England from the fate of his fictional hero, who’s lured by Mornington ...”

“... who grow hundreds of acres of wheat, ride to hounds and potter in their walled garden. History, Stephen Dedalus groaned, is a nightmare from which I’m trying to awake – but these friends of ours are for the most part happily slumberous. For a couple of years I managed to put the child off on the grounds that he was too little, but this August I had to ...”

“... to a pig, marvelling in between takes at some wonderful run-down 18th-century barns with intricate grey beamed roofs and sagging tiles. Nick H. seems happy enough and has at least got round the obstacle which always stopped me directing films – namely, having to say: ‘Action!’ My instinct would be to say: ‘Er, I think if everybody’s agreeable we ...”

“... The appeal to necessity has a long history in warfare. In The Rights and Duties of Neutrals Stephen Neff calls it ‘a sort of juridical “wild card” which allows a state to “trump” the normal rights of other states in times of desperation’.* Germany wasn’t the only country to have played it: in 1807 necessity was invoked to justify ...”

“... as if quite natural. There is no jolt, no place to pause and say this is no longer believable. Stephen King considers Jackson one of the great horror writers because she ‘never had to raise her voice’. There are no sudden twists in ‘The Lottery’. It appears to darken gradually, although in fact it does so at remarkable speed. Tessie’s reaction ...”

“... behind it in her story. The Rise of the People’s Bank of China, by the political scientists Stephen Bell and Hui Feng, looks at how institutional change happens in a society with no place for overt political competition. It also conveys far greater anxiety than Yueh’s book about the urgent need for rapid change. At the end of their book, Bell and Feng ...”

“... is notoriously difficult – indeed impossible – in any individual case. (See on this Stephen Jay Gould’s unpacking of the eight months’ ‘median survival’ that he had been promised for his abdominal mesothelioma in his 1985 essay ‘The Median Isn’t the Message’.) For all sorts of reason – genuine agnosticism, the acknowledged ...”

“... the bus-traveller’s equivalent of the zigzag walk (first left, first right ad infinitum) that Stephen Graham had earlier recommended, in The Gentle Art of Tramping (1926), as a way of manoeuvring the modern city into new patterns of disclosure. Starting at Victoria Coach Station, Goldring boards a bus that is about to depart for Essex, a county he has ...”

“... hair ... a bad back here, a heavy paunch there’. Sartorially, they are drabbies, ‘awful old grey suits and worse black ties ... or else the ... uniform of the Left on parade, a dark old coat left open to the weather ... corduroy trousers ... Tuf boots’. Acting as MC for the occasion, Inglis introduces us to the mourners – Terry ...”

“... made ‘tinted drawings’, first drawing their outlines, shading them through in black or grey, and finally ‘staining’ or ‘tinting’ them. The most distinguished practitioner of this method, for Pyne, was Sandby, ‘whose memory is regarded with veneration by the present school’. His importance now, however, was that he had laid a foundation ...”

“... all off, Maggie Smith seems to enjoy transforming herself into Miss Shepherd, today showing me her grey mottled legs as if they are a newly completed landscape. She’s particularly pleased with the ulcers she has incorporated into the decorative scheme, displaying them with the relish of a beggar on the streets of Calcutta. In her body-stocking and headband ...”

“... Sue de Beauvoir.I do so hope she’s a relation.1 February, Yorkshire. Last time we visited Kirkby Stephen we were in Mrs H.’s shop when a clock chimed. I’ve never wanted a clock and this one was pretty dull, made in the 1950s probably and very plain. But the chime, a full Westminster chime, was so appealing that we talked about it on the way home and ...”

“... a man called Tommy Stadlen. The unwanted return left his pregnant wife ‘waist-high in a sea of grey-brown liquid’. A posse of bedraggled rats had washed up in a neighbour’s flat. A month’s supply of rain had fallen in ninety minutes. Embattled water companies, with a duty to tend the profit curves of their shareholders, hide behind a monsoon of ...”

“... the entrepreneurial spirit as a revivifying force by running endless mugshots of the man in a grey flannel suit? So the photographers go to work, decentring the figure, absorbing it into its own reflection, dismembering and scattering it about the place. Unlikely angles proliferate as the background is picked over for relieving features which can be drawn ...”