“... allowing every potential show of principle to appear like a fluttering of small resentments. It may be the chief characteristic of the Windsor dynasty, this ability to make grand things small. The Poet Laureate, Andrew Motion, wrote a poem for the wedding which rather effectively takes them out of the great tide of history and into the more local business ...”

“... and this has always been one of them: Raworth is unwell but never incapacitated. The moustache may be a little greyer than the version flourished in early snapshots – the cover of A Serial Biography, the Barry Flanagan etching from Act – but this is still the same mouth, the same disguise. The same bite. The lights are on and there is somebody at ...”

“... how easily his poetry could become a mellifluous soporific. Just as we ‘dream of blossomed May’ in the ‘chill thaw’ of February, so the ‘hapless lover’s dull shame sinks/Away sometimes in day-dreams, and he thinks/No more of yesterday’s disgrace and foil.’ The disgrace was personal. By the time he was writing the poem, the Red House was ...”

“... battles of the First World War, had been summoned to join a desperate French government in late May 1940. The French armies were in full retreat, and on 10 June the government abandoned Paris, initially for Tours. Six days later, Paul Reynaud resigned as prime minister and passed the leadership to Pétain. Jackson describes with verve the chaos that ...”

“... He promised to follow up with the DWP, but died not long after Pring spoke to him, in May 2024. His obituaries claim that the assessments he pioneered ‘focused on rehabilitation, reskilling and support for people with disabilities’. While Aylward insisted that the quality of assessments was the problem, his biopsychosocial model of disability ...”

“... suggests, the primary class division of 21st-century capitalism.The scale of this transformation may be overstated. The family has long been a key organisational unit of capitalist social relations; the corporation persists, and public asset managers remain more powerful than private firms; and there have always been wealthy dynasties, though profitable new ...”

“... news media at all has risen from 8 per cent to 30 per cent. Many of the people in this group may be using social media to follow celebrities, cooking or DIY accounts, or influencers talking about fashion or wellness. But a significant number will be regularly exposed to an algorithmically filtered vision of society that stokes resentments.We are ...”

“... FATF is the proverbial 800-pound gorilla of anti-money laundering – or AML – activities. You may think that’s already too many acronyms, but brace yourself, because the AML focus of the FATF has led to the regulatory measures KYC (know your customer), SAR (suspicious activity reports), CTR (currency transaction reports), PEP (politically exposed ...”

“... to which foids consign men they don’t take seriously. ‘The ideology of the manosphere may be particularly attractive to white, heterosexual men because it appeals to and reinforces their sense of aggrieved entitlement,’ Kennedy-Kollar writes. ‘Their dissatisfaction and anger stem, ultimately, from the feeling that they are being denied ...”

“... character was inspired by the case of Nafissatou Diallo, a maid at a New York hotel, who in May 2011 alleged that Dominique Strauss-Kahn, the head of the International Monetary Fund, had assaulted and attempted to rape her when she came to clean his suite. It transpired that Diallo had lied on her asylum application and made irregular financial ...”

“... She had nothing to do with the clandestine distribution of her work – ‘the higher-up editors may have been against me, but the people beneath them had good taste’ – but it is of a piece with the harried, furtive character of the stories, scraps of narrative exchanged in the dark. She told Laird that her goal when writing was ‘that the story will ...”

“... a tiny shoe; the man who drags his heels down to one side drags his spirit to one side, too, you may be sure. But observations of that kind are really pretty rudimentary. How often do human beings smell one another’s feet, and how subtle are the conclusions they draw from the odours that every pair of feet produces? Have you ever known a human who has ...”

“... people like Luther, of course; but those who believe in the silencing of dissent, as More did, may well be silenced themselves, and we should shed no tears if their own unpleasant beliefs have had their revenge on them. And could More really not have been different? Other men have believed quite as strongly in God or gods without sending people of ...”

“... matter: do not judge me, judge my programmes, they are good for you, no matter what hanky-panky I may be up to. The 1997 speech contained his brief for the defence long before Monica Lewinsky was in the news. The majority of the members of the US Congress are not easily shocked, but some Democrats and many Republicans depend for their re-election on Christian ...”

“... Theology. No doubt that restless instrumental intelligence has been thinking that some advantage may be gained from talking with this Dominican who so much wants his blessing for the marriage of Christ and Marx. So Fidel y la Religion sold a million copies in Cuba, where there is not so much else to read, and where curiosity about what Castro is thinking is ...”