“... or more of African-Americans have experienced some form of discrimination in housing: that means that, in the current generation, there have been about ten million incidents at least as humiliating to those involved as an incident which Williams recounts from her own experience. The story is no substitute for the statistics, but it makes them a little ...”

“... the original SDP was incorrigibly Old Labour by Blairite standards. They have more time for David Owen’s later ‘tough love’ posture, though preferring what they call a ‘rounded’ blend of social market and community. Their explicit starting point is Thatcherism, their strategy to ‘move forward from where Margaret Thatcher left off’. Their ...”

“... be accepted at the outset. Anyone – to be more specific, mountebanks like Daniel Goldhagen and David Cesarani – with not a lot to say, but with a will to dilate about atrocity, can extort a hearing for themselves. Others, with more to say, seem to have a clause in their contracts demanding that they mention it at least once in any article, be it on ...”

“... an exhibition structure conceived as ‘a huge shelving system’ (a project presented by means of a Meccano model), and an apartment high-rise in which almost everything could emerge from a kit of prefabricated parts. Given projects such as the Reliance Controls factory and the ‘zip-up house’, the Beaubourg did not come out of the ...”

“... is a sure sign of a ranch house and irrigation, though there are entire valleys – and a valley means a place five or ten miles wide and several times as long – in which there is no house to be seen. Highway 50 traverses a dozen of these valleys and passes; driven in a day they succeed one another like musical variations, with their subtle differences of ...”

“... can say you are.’ As with the opposition, the toilet doors ‘bang increasingly frequently’. David Kirk, acting captain from the start of the tournament: ‘Remember, you’re the All Blacks. You carry with you the memory of the past. That’s a force.’ Andy Dalton, the nominated captain who failed to play a single match because of a training ...”

“... of asking him how he is, and Campbell replies that he feels ‘both homicidal and suicidal’. He means it, too. All this makes his Diaries a strange read, because they are interesting, indeed fascinating, in many of their details, yet draining and demoralising in their cumulative effect. Reading this book is like standing listening to someone ranting and ...”

“... and Marcello is teaching Anna how to be bored ‘in a certain way. Like brilliantly.’ That means taking his red pencil to phrases such as ‘penetratingly difficult’, but letting ‘eerily symbolic’ survive. (Barthelme’s biographer, Tracy Daugherty, points out that in the same issue as ‘L’Lapse’, a reviewer can be found complaining that ...”

“... of Sir Walter Scott, from whose life and writing he learned so much, Cooper found in fiction a means of restoring his family’s fortunes. His most famous creation was the frontiersman Natty Bumppo, also known as Leatherstocking (on account of his leggings), Hawk-eye (on account of his astonishingly good eyesight), La Longue Carabine (on account of his ...”

“... craft to folk culture, Catholic to Protestant everyday life. Heaney met the singer and filmmaker David Hammond in the ‘pre-Troubles, upbeat folk scene Belfast of the mid-1960s’; through him, and after the move to Dublin, he ‘got to know a lot of people, north and south, who were involved with traditional music’, among them Garech Browne of Claddagh ...”

“... first-class people to semi-starvation.’ He had in mind the treatment of people like his father, David, who, as Bevan put it, was ‘choked to death’ by pneumoconiosis (a lung condition caused by long-term inhalation of coal dust) but received no compensation since the condition wasn’t classified as an industrial disease under the Workmen’s ...”

“... that’s been nearly universally praised. Before it was even published, the New Yorker’s editor, David Remnick, called it ‘extraordinary’; the New York Times critic A.O. Scott said it was ‘essential, like water or air’; in a widely circulated blurb, Toni Morrison likened Coates to Baldwin and declared the book ‘required reading’; even Jay-Z ...”

“... Johns continued with Hopps, ‘and how to add space and still keep it an object painting.’ His means were sometimes simple (a tin cup or an old ruler attached to a canvas), and sometimes complicated: spatial bursts of bright colours stencilled with the names of those colours but in ways that rarely match up. Such developments close out the first decade of ...”

“... another programmer prompted me to look into ‘fingerprinting’. Fingerprinting a phone or laptop means scanning it for characteristics that will help to identify it at a later point or in a different context. What model do you have? Which language setting are you using? Which browser, and which version of it? How does your browser render fonts on your ...”

“... occupied with the achievements of Thomas Cromwell, has never thought biography to be the fitting means of approaching him. Biography now belongs to the margins of historical writing. The economic and sociological determinism of the 20th century has questioned the influence of great men, while its psychological determinism has undermined their dignity. To ...”