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“... parents were just undemonstrative as I remember nothing comparable to the pride of the parents of Neil Kinnock, for instance, when he passed the 11+ (and so wouldn’t have to go down the mine). I can’t even remember taking the exam except that my friend (and alphabetical neighbour on the school register) Albert Benson passed it with me but was too poor to ...”

“... The explosive potential of The State and Revolution can’t be overestimated: in its pages, as Neil Harding wrote in Leninism (1996), ‘the vocabulary and grammar of the Western tradition of politics was abruptly dispensed with.’ What followed can be called, borrowing the title of Althusser’s text on Machiavelli, la solitude de Lenine: a time when he ...”

“... going to be a case of ‘ghastly thro’ the drizzling rain,/On the bald street breaks the blank day.’ What was surprising, then, was that some Leavers too were a little fractious. Even before Big Ben had failed, as it turned out, to bong in celebration of the UK’s deliverance (Northern Ireland only sort of), there were spots of disillusion already ...”

“... a community and the failings of a welfare state. Venables and Thompson re-enacted something that day: they played out a fantasy of watching and being watched. Much of what they did – ‘let’s steal a kid,’ Thompson said – was based on a fantasy drawn from a home video they’d seen together, Child’s Play 3, a story about a psychotic killer-doll ...”

“... exploitative. Names that come up in this context tend to be better known to mainstream audiences: Neil LaBute, Michael Haneke, Lars Von Trier. But it’s Nelson’s thoughts about the stuff that flickers in the middle that bears most directly on writers of memoir. The idea, for example, that if we can see the artist is suffering, that makes it OK that the ...”

“... a ship to take him back to France. The young man put in charge of his safety was Flora’s cousin Neil MacEachen, who later changed his name to Macdonald. (He had a brave and remarkable life as a courier for the Jacobite resistance, a novelist and – in French exile – the father of Marshal Étienne Macdonald, one of Napoleon’s most formidable ...”

“... what has usually been ignored and often denied: the female capacity for successful aggression. Neil Kinnock always used to claim that his ability to attack Thatcher at Prime Minister’s Question Time was sapped by natural chivalry in the face of a woman. This was self-serving nonsense. What defeated him, and so many others, was the fact that she was a ...”

“... which had now captured the block votes. Benn recorded that it was ‘the end of a historic day – the product of ten years’ work’. The Labour Movement had asserted itself against the Parliamentary Party, and purged itself of the Gang of Four in the process. Since the SDP was hardly more than a creature of the media – ‘the BBC is now the voice ...”

“... incompatible.’ A.J. Ayer condemned him for having an idea of socialism that ‘resembles present-day America’, while another critic sneered that there was ‘a jukebox struggling to get out of him’. Yet so far from seeking sameness, his book can be read as a path-breaking socialist plea for choice: a Fabian tract that rejected asceticism in favour of a ...”

“... the wind and the multi-year cycles of the moon’s orbit. Invasion and retreat happen twice a day, and the difference between high and low tides on the British coast – 6.38 metres in Boston in 2022 – is many times larger than the anticipated sea-level increase from global warming. The south-east Lincolnshire fenland has seen radical natural changes in ...”

“... party of government. And in this case the party members were in tune with the leadership: Neil Kinnock, who had spent the past few years painstakingly trying to distance himself from the militant elements of his movement, was nonetheless unwilling or unable to give up his personal commitment to unilateralism (he later said that even if he had wanted ...”

“... to have heard as a child that he was shot accidentally – ‘by his own guns’. But my uncle Neil, her only brother, can’t believe ‘they would have told the family that.’ Newton was said to be artistic: two dusty little green-grey daubs – both of them Derbyshire landscapes – are among his surviving effects. There are two photographs of him in ...”

“... sitting at the next table. She rushed over and did the Heimlich manoeuvre and saved his life. Next day the headline read: Barbra Streisand Takes the Food Right Out of a Person’s Mouth.’ Streisand repeats the joke in her autobiography, My Name Is Barbra, to explain why she felt a ‘certain kinship’ with Bill Clinton during his presidency. ‘People can ...”

“... when I say John taught me how to be debauched.’ He got to meet all sorts of people, including Neil Young – who performed his forthcoming album, Harvest, at a party in John’s house – and Brian Wilson of the Beach Boys, who, when Elton went to see him, sang the chorus of ‘Your Song’ (‘I hope you don’t mind/I hope you don’t mind’) over and ...”

“... ringing in my ears, and sends a cold shiver through my body. Today, Monday, the chief business day, Jews were attacked right and left. I myself witnessed one scene where a Jew was actually running for his life, and as he passed through one crowd he was actually hemmed in by another till the police came on the scene. Father Creagh’s first sermon was on ...”