“... in 2023. The changes made to the GCSE and, to some extent, A-level syllabuses in English when Michael Gove was education secretary between 2010 and 2014 almost seemed designed to put schoolchildren off studying English at university, so restricted and unimaginatively traditional are the set texts and the emphasis on formulaic answers. A fall in the ...”

“... of unplanned pregnancies – Arthur Seaton, for instance, in Saturday Night and Sunday Morning or Michael Caine’s Alfie – while the women suffer, from their men as much as their abortions. The moral question faced by these men, who until now have been indiscriminately handing round their penises, is whether they will take responsibility for the sex that ...”

“... instability also magnified the importance of the party membership – around 170,000 mainly white, male pensioners – who account for 0.4 per cent of the electorate and whose views on all subjects are far to the right of the public (Bale regularly reminds the reader of this). They have chosen two prime ministers in the last five years (May and ...”

“... the works of Mao Zedong. Through Hilda, he met and became friends with an American Marxist, Harold White, and in due course, with survivors of Castro’s Moncada rebellion. The Guatemalan revolution was nearing its end. In July 1954, an invading army, backed by the CIA, overthrew the elected government of Arbenz and replaced it with a military dictatorship, a ...”

“... as a ‘neoliberal intensification of mothering’: perfectly turned out middle-class, mainly white mothers, with their perfect jobs, perfect husbands and marriages, whose permanent glow of self-satisfaction is intended to make all the women who don’t conform to that image – because they are poorer or black or their lives are just more humanly ...”

“... million, with another £100 million in cuts planned for the next three years. ‘People went white … at the prospect of it,’ Nick Forbes,its leader, told the Guardian in 2011. ‘There was a sense of disbelief about what it all meant, and the scale of cuts we would have to make.’ ‘I think that once the first or second wave of councils has gone ...”

“... Auden went to Portugal to work on a play, The Ascent of F-6, with Isherwood. The protagonist, Michael Ransom, sets out to conquer a faraway mountain in a place called Sudoland. If he succeeds, it will add to the honour and glory of England. When he finally reaches the summit, he meets his mother, who is a sort of Britannia. He is eulogised as one of ...”

“... ridiculous. Literary artists have worked in the genre: Poe, Wilkie Collins, Simenon, Chandler and Michael Innes among others. But the true English ‘classics’ of the 1920s and Thirties, the books we evoke in recalling a body in a locked library in a country house, hardly go in for artistry. V.S. Pritchett once wrote down the whole genre as philistine, and ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... a popular iconography, Andy Warhol is probably the most single-minded and the most spectacular,’ Michael Fried wrote in Art International in December 1962. ‘Warhol’s beautiful, vulgar, heartbreaking icons of Marilyn Monroe … and [his] feeling for what is truly human and pathetic is one of the exemplary myths of our time.’ The architect Philip Johnson ...”

“... as Chaunu sees it, did not last long. By the Seventies, the faithful too had been struck by the ‘White Death’ of negative rates of reproduction. But this was now a catastrophic general pattern in the West, which France had rejoined. Meanwhile, in the countryside, the peasantry was carried away by what Braudel calls ‘a deluge Bloch could never have ...”

“... is bilge’ (the German quark, which has since made its way into English, literally means ‘soft white cheese’). But whatever the conditions in which she found herself – in Warsaw, she was one of 14 political prisoners crammed into a single cell – she never lost her fervour: her joy, as she put it, amid the horrors of the world. ‘My inner ...”

“... call up a theme Welles shared with a writer he cared for, Robert Graves or Isak Dinesen or T.H. White, yet the commentary never takes two breaths free of the words and images it has set spinning from a theme by Welles. This performance is an indoor spectacle, in no way compelling, since ideas are never allowed to develop beyond a sentence or two. The ...”

“... Arthur Gold, a brilliant Luftmensch prone to tormented idleness, and the future art critic Michael Fried, were Jews. His dissertation and first book were about Joseph Conrad’s explorations of ambiguity and double identities. As Timothy Brennan writes in Places of Mind, Said was ‘a photo negative of his Jewish counterparts’.Said spent his first ...”

“... local government. And it felt right, for blacks, Asians, women, gays and any number of straight white men.But not for everybody. There were those who saw the point of diversity, and even equal rights, but who objected to equality-in-diversity, a fatal combination in their view, with its suggestion that the case for homegrown, European values must now be ...”