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“... In a speech​  at the University of East London in February 2010 David Cameron, then leader of the opposition, promised to lift the lid on ‘secret corporate lobbying’. The ‘far too cosy relationship between politics, government, business and money’, he said, would end on his watch. The full text of his speech isn’t easy to find – the Conservative Party erased ten years’ worth of speeches and press releases from its website in 2013 – but the internet doesn’t forget ...”

“... produces a class of super-qualified and clever people who are nevertheless shut out of society’s higher-status zones. The world is split between sellouts and burnouts – guess who takes the lion’s share? ‘Let me stand on the rooftop of my reckoning,’ says Lewis ‘Teabag’ Miner, the narrator of Lipsyte’...”

“... hydrocarbons, not Western oil needs. In 1945, Gordon Merriam, the head of the State Department’s Near Eastern Affairs division, made this clear: the Saudi oilfields, he said, were first and foremost ‘a stupendous source of strategic power’. The assistant secretary of state, Adolf Berle, sketched out what remains US strategy: the US and Britain would ...”

“... on? Do you like buying stuff for others, or yourself? Do you resent paying income tax? What’s the most you’ve ever spent on a dress? Who were you closest to as a child? How often do you phone your mum? What would you normally be doing at this moment, if you weren’t doing this? What do you do on your own in a hotel room? Why? Questions like this are ...”

“... Six North Africans were playing boules beneath Flaubert’s statue. Clean cracks sounded over the grumble of jammed traffic. With a final, ironic caress from the fingertips, a brown hand despatched a metal globe. It landed, hopped to reveal a small moon-crater, and curved slowly in a scatter of hard dust ...”

“... only estimates with confidence intervals equivalent to tens of thousands of lives. The war’s survivors were forced into violence or flight. A polity that had already endured a decade of genocidal sanctions suffered total collapse. The subsequent occupation was upheld through the use of torture and justified by the evidence of depleted uranium ...”

“... half a pound of Epping butter). ‘I can’t touch the Indian fruits or the fish which they say is so delicious,’ Robinson wrote to her sister Fanny, ‘and as to the curries it makes me sick to think of them.’As a child in the early 1980s, I believed that curry was synonymous with Indian food and that Indian food was synonymous with curry, or at ...”

“... at the Glastonbury Festival and boasts his own website (www.tonybenn.com). As Tony Blair’s Government spins itself further into policy confusion, the world according to Benn has never seemed clearer. From the public platform, and from his column in the Morning Star, he has aligned himself with a new generation of popular protest ...”

“... is a writer who understands the power of lists. In An Encyclopedia of Myself, he has written not so much an autobiography as a series of detailed inventories of English provincial life in the 1950s – a world of sadistic army majors and ‘disgusting pork sausages’, anxious politeness and Tudorbethan houses, the Cold War and cathedral spires. Meades lists ...”

“... if the subject were not Christina Stead (1902-83) and the question had not figured so importantly in her conception of herself. The pictorial evidence is contradictory; but it appears that as a young woman she had good features, a fine, keen, intelligent face, somewhat spoiled by prominent front teeth, which were removed when she was 40. She ...”

“... littering the sofa tables of the Manchester bourgeosie. In the 1980s, the American poet David Antin charged that ‘anthologies are to poets as the zoo is to animals.’ More recently, Marjorie Perloff called for undergraduates to swear off Evian, in the hope that tap-water drinkers could afford unabridged books rather than hackneyed ...”

“... people at the time it seemed outrageous. Their outrage was to be a major element in the revanchism so ably exploited by Hitler in his rise to power, and in the remorse that paralysed so much of British enlightened opinion when it came to dealing with him. After the Second World War there was less room for doubt. Only a few ...”

“... So​ far Joe Biden has fulfilled the promise of his campaign. His administration has been mostly dull, and nothing has radically changed. Towards the end of the summer, after the US evacuation from Kabul, his approval rating dipped below 50 per cent and over the autumn it sank into the low 40s. In the media he’s widely seen as a lame duck, as columnists speculate about whether he will run for a second term in 2024, at the age of 81, or be replaced by a pundit’s dream ticket of Kamala Harris and Pete Buttigieg ...”

“... winter and I was watching humpback whales. This time I hardly dared lift the binoculars. That’s never happened to me before: a reluctance to go to the coast and, once there, a reluctance to scan the waves. But twenty miles due east down the firth stands the Bass Rock, the biggest gannetry on earth. The Bass is the plug of an ancient ...”

“... she was chairing a discussion of the Gainsborough exhibition then at Tate Britain. Gainsborough’s landscapes, she invited one of her panel to agree, were ‘irrelevant’. She meant, I think, that they had nothing to say to the present day, and I can’t forget her remark only because I repeat it so often to my ...”