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“... of these squabbling, down-at-heel literati would be comfortably at home in the pages of Olivia Manning. To the extent that it offers a kind of instant history, Curfew must already be a period piece. The nightly curfew, with its silence broken by the wailing of sirens and the droning of police helicopters, was lifted before the end of the Pinochet ...”

“... vision may not differ all that much from the one contained in the celebrated final volume of Manning Clark’s History of Australia, subtitled The Old Dead Tree and the Young Tree Green, which shows what ‘grovelling’ to the British did for Australia between 1915 and 1935; but he’s his own man and no one ever claimed him as a radical ...”

“... his parents’ generation can still relish his devastating satire of the all-too-worldly Cardinal Manning or his shrewd portrait of the demons that drove the supposedly saintly Florence Nightingale. Yet Strachey himself seems less our contemporary now than he did when Michael Holroyd’s biography appeared in the late 1960s. Greeting the publication of ...”

“... technology in order to make the things people wanted at the lowest prices. The main drawback was manning: people were the most inefficient, disordered and inconsistent moving parts of the assembly line. They got sick. They had to be paid. They had to be taught what to do. The solution was to strip workers of skills and confine them to narrow, repetitive ...”

“... no information to hand over. Here again the manual becomes important: it interprets silence as the mark of a hardened terrorist, someone trained (as by the SERE unit) to keep mum under pressure. There is a name for this: ‘advanced resistance’. The typical response to it is to apply more and more pressure, a cycle known as ‘force drift’. The result in ...”

“... In October 2010, a group of activists announced on the alternative news site Indymedia that Mark Kennedy, an undercover officer working with the NPOIU, had infiltrated them. Since then, a good deal of detail about the tactics of the NPOIU and SDS, the double lives its officers led and the people they exploited and betrayed, has been brought to ...”

“... general election that he believed Theresa May could dominate British politics for a generation. Mark Lilla, a professor at Columbia and a regular contributor to the New York Review of Books, wants the Democratic Party, which under Bill Clinton captured ‘Americans’ imaginations about our shared destiny’, to abandon identity politics and help liberalism ...”

“... in Bungay every day. I’d make lunch, waiting for him to get off the phone or stop ranting about Mark Stephens, his lawyer. Sometimes he was ranting at Stephens, and I have a tape where you can hear each side of the conversation as they talk about money. During those days at the Bungay house I would try to sit him down with a new list of questions, and ...”

“... this proved unnecessary, and the city was handed over intact: ‘And when day came and those manning the citadels realised the city had been taken and the King killed, they handed over the citadels . . . Cyrus ordered the heralds to make a proclamation that all Babylonians deliver up their arms, and he ordered that wherever weapons were found in a ...”

“... years were passed under the sign of a stagnant Brezhnevism, an experience that clearly left its mark: in 2004 she was to describe herself as ‘a 45-year-old Muscovite who observed the Soviet Union at its most disgraceful in the 1970s and 1980s’. After studying journalism at Moscow State University and graduating in 1980, she started her first job at ...”

“... and thereby denied them legal recognition of their gender. In 1986, female-to-male transsexual Mark Rees, in the first challenge to the ruling, lost his case at the European Court of Human Rights against the UK government for its non-recognition of his status as male, loss of privacy and barring his marriage to a woman. Only with the Gender Recognition Act ...”

“... have treated Huggins with more respect. 11 January. Picture in the Guardian of an American soldier manning a gun in Baghdad, stencilled on the front of the gun a death’s head. That’s why the war is lost. 25 January. I’ve taken to eating the occasional date, though it’s not a fruit I wholly like. Mam used to eat them when we were little, bought in small ...”

“... my starting point: London Stone. This beacon, on the east bank of the Yantlet Creek, is said to mark the point at which the Thames merges with the North Sea. ‘From London Stone the ships set their course for the Nore lightship and the waves of the ocean. The song of the Thames has ended.’ Walking west, away from the creek, a wide-sky epic ...”

“... rage’, his ‘calm, generous and open’ mother ‘a born peacemaker’ – left a two-fold mark on him: on the one hand, acquiring as a baby ‘the rock-bottom security that came from being unconditionally loved by his mother’, who bore him when she was 38; on the other, learning as a boy from the spectacle of his father the need for ‘strategies of ...”

“... office, which was directly opposite, took up the game, with generally poor results. Olivia Manning, loosely disguised as Harriet in The Balkan Trilogy, provides this commentary:She walked … across the square into the Calea Victoriei and, passing through the parrot-land of the Gypsy flower-sellers, reached the British Propaganda Bureau. No one was ...”