“... gaunt, aristocratic, very dignified: a strong, yet sensitive face, crowned by untidy locks of white hair: horn-rimmed glasses, through which shone strange, otherworldly eyes. He wore evening dress, with a soft shirt. He leaned slightly forward, resting both hands on the chair in front of him, and on the little finger of his left hand was a ...”

“... here that Hollywood stars used to come, Marilyn Monroe and Arthur Miller or Liz Taylor and Richard Burton, for a quickie divorce followed by a huge party, or a discreet abortion. ‘Juárez’s bad reputation goes back thirty years,’ says Arnulfo Gómez, the owner of the Gato Félix, on the Avenida Juárez near the bridge. There used to be ten or ...”

“... through the existing culture of banking. Too many bankers share the view of ethics expressed by Richard Desmond at the Leveson Inquiry – ‘Well, “ethical”, I don’t quite know what the word means’ – and see complexity, of the sort arising from the proposed legislation, as an opportunity to make money. In fact, the ethical void revealed by the ...”

“... on pilgrims’ lodgings. The ceremony itself requires that the pilgrim come clothed in a simple white sheet and nothing else. All valuables have to be left behind and local gangs became especially adept at stealing watches and gold. Soon, the more experienced pilgrims realised that the ‘pure souls’ of Mecca weren’t above thieving. They began to take ...”

“... Most of them were developed under Andrew Adonis’s academies programme for New Labour: the Richard Rogers-designed Mossbourne Community Academy in Hackney, which opened in 2004, is one of these, as is Zaha Hadid’s Evelyn Grace Academy in Brixton. The programme was launched in 2000 by the then education secretary, David Blunkett, who explained that if ...”

“... policy of those who won the referendum, the Tories, defiant of the EU and subservient to the White House, had become ‘résistants towards Brussels, but pétainistes towards Washington’. Johnson, aptly depicted by Mount as ‘a seedy, treacherous character’, was both ruthlessly ambitious and totally unprincipled. For Wheatcroft, as a writer for the ...”

“... is condemned by the Koran and there is no room for interpretation.’ When it was discovered that Richard Reid, the shoe bomber, was a British Muslim, more than a hundred mosques and Islamic centres were visited by the police. ‘Do you have any relations with the Taliban?’ was one opening gambit used to win over law-abiding Muslims to the cause of the ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”