“... it down. There had been a Centre for Contemporary Cultural Studies at Birmingham University since Richard Hoggart set it up in 1964, but cultural studies proper only really started after Hall took over as director a few years later: ‘What is the discipline? We didn’t have one. In a way we had to construct it. Not because we had huge ambitions to be ...”

“... were in the mid 1970s coming to represent a sort of alternative establishment. His antipathy to Richard Branson was partly a matter of distaste for what Virgin represented (a music-first ethos of drift-and-discovery and whimsical eccentricity), but also a creeping fear, once the Pistols had joined the label, that the perpetually grinning Branson, in his ...”

“... Kramer, Charles Murray, Paul Craig Roberts, Irving Kristol, even such names for the connoisseur as Richard Cornuelle – they are among the fruits of a mutually beneficial association. For on the one side, there are limits to local supply – the efforts of Conor Cruise O’Brien, Paul Johnson or Norman Stone, however infallible, will only go so far; while on ...”

“... shared. But the occasion did provide one perfect vignette of the Thatcher era:The bishops included Richard Harries, the new bishop of Oxford, at that time a frequent broadcaster on Radio 4’s ‘Thought for the Day’, to which Mrs Thatcher usually listened. As he recalled, ‘Mrs Thatcher welcomed us very graciously for drinks before lunch. “Ah,” she ...”

“... This isn’t new: there was a genre called Black Naturalism which encompassed such writers as Richard Wright, Ann Petry and Paul Laurence Dunbar. The Black Naturalists found naturalism a ready-made mode for representing life under white supremacy. For many Black Americans, there was always a boundary in sight, setting a ...”

“... is late for the scholarship pupil plot in Britain and Ireland. John McGahern, Edna O’Brien, Richard Hoggart, Raymond Williams: they were all born between the end of the First World War and the early 1930s, and published their stories of class alienation in the late 1950s and early 1960s. It’s a bit late, too, for the middle-class unmarried motherhood ...”

“... point. Schröder’s appeal, pitched expressly to ‘the New Middle’, proved most effective with white-collar employees, where the SPD gained 6 per cent nationwide, and pulled over significant numbers of the self-employed, some of them former Green supporters. There was little gender variance in the vote, with the exception of young women under 24, who went ...”

“... in Mile End because the markets were better over there, but at least Westfield was near her now in White City. She was 31. ‘I was born in Egypt 11,426 days ago,’ she told one of her neighbours, pleased with the new app on her iPhone that could count days. Rania was a great fan of Snapchat, she posted there every spare minute she had, and on Instagram and ...”

“... communism rather than hierarchy, a possibility glimpsed, or anyway named, in the literary theorist Richard Dienst’s recent The Bonds of Debt, which at one point rather vaguely imagines a future ‘radical politics of indebtedness’ fulfilling the slogans of classical Marxism.*) But regular monetised exchanges – completed or incomplete – are a relative ...”

“... Hamlet’ has a more absolute meaning. In an early allusion, the writer of an elegy for Richard Burbage after his death in 1619 names his great roles as     young Hamlett, ould Hieronymoe, Kind Leer, the Greved More – where Hamlet is young as Lear is kind and the Moor grieved. The phrase, which may have been regular in use, gives a valuable ...”

“... Smiddy in the United States on the activities of anti-Treaty elements there, and from Michael Mac White at the League of Nations in Geneva about his ‘general disappointment’ at the Dáil’s decision not to apply for membership ‘for the moment’. When Sir Eric Drummond enquired what had led to this decision MacWhite felt it necessary to refer him to ...”

“... servant John Vassall as a Soviet agent and illustrated with a photo of him lying on his bed in white underpants, ‘a spy and homo – a gilt-edged specimen of his type’. This gay-basher’s guide to ‘THE CRAWLER’, ‘THE FUSSY DRESSER’ etc sums up and hopes to activate prejudice, but is perhaps less revealing than the Daily Herald’s ‘What I ...”

“... less certain than they were when the ships were planned). Their paintwork, with the usual CalMac white superstructure above a black hull, dips in a curve towards the stern, aiming to give an impression of speed, power and modernity. A century ago liners sometimes had an unnecessary third or fourth funnel to achieve the same effect.The Comet was built only a ...”

“... hatreds also provoked by the election of the first black president, the dogs baying on the White House lawn. Which of these public sentiments will prevail? Only time, as they say, will tell. For now, our era seems only rarely to be capable of marshalling collective affect in the direction of the common good. As Tony Judt has eloquently argued on ...”

“... but cappuccino and croissants smell better than diesel fumes, and polished terrazzo flooring and white-enamelled steel have more appeal than sooty brick and the brownish, magnetised dust from cast-iron brake blocks that formerly clung to every metal surface. After all, railways never set out to be ‘atmospheric’, but to perform a valuable and profitable ...”