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“... was dead, and it was time to spend. Between the plague of 1348 and a second wave in 1361, wages rose steeply, and workers couldn’t wait to enjoy the good things in life. ‘There is scarcely a villein today who is satisfied with his lot,’ a sermon writer complained. Oxherds and ploughmen were eating well. Artisans were going about dressed as ...”

“... rather grotesque cri de coeur: ‘If only the victims of Ted Bundy, Ivan Milat or Frederick and Rose West had exercised the same survival instinct.’ Perhaps Trout isn’t cursed with sons the way I am – possibly he has three lovely smiley blonde daughters like Chris Patten, a once bullish Tory minister, who, or so I ...”

“... work: ‘If he hired a housekeeper, national income went up, economic growth increased, employment rose and unemployment fell. If he subsequently married her, and she continued to do precisely the same activities, national income and growth went down, employment fell and unemployment rose. This is absurd (and sexist).’ The ...”

“... a billion of them left over.If you want a guide to how we got here, you won’t do better than Chris Miller’s comprehensive, eye-opening Chip War. Insofar as we work, live and think differently from forty years ago, we do so thanks to the revolutions in economics and communication whose enabling technology are those microchips, which have been both the ...”

“... press officer and deputy chair of the Party’s Social Justice Commission. The ice-cool Hewitt rose to fame in the 1970s, when she replaced Martin Loney as general secretary of the National Council for Civil Liberties after he was ousted in a coup. She narrowly lost Leicester East for Labour in 1983, was a prominent member of the Institute for Public ...”

“... is much the most coherent of the three collections. Packed with citations of Foucault, Nikolas Rose and of course Joyce (but not McKibbin or Stedman Jones), almost all its essays are concerned with the way liberal practices and technologies (free markets, free labour) produce new relations of power. A characteristic Foucauldian fondness for paradox is much ...”

“... at risk of famine, and 900,000 children were at critical risk. As the cost of a 25 kg bag of wheat rose to $415, there were stories of Palestinians eating grass. People I spoke to who had left Gaza told me that their relatives were going without food for days on end.As the situation deteriorated, there were reports of looting. Israel has repeatedly blamed this ...”

“... has the power to define the classes of people entitled to legal aid. The current lord chancellor, Chris Grayling, reacting in part to some high-profile cases in which foreign nationals secured victories in human rights cases funded by legal aid, recently issued a regulation that limited (with a few exceptions) the provision of legal aid to ...”

“... the journalist’s introduction to his new boss: ‘Savitsky, the commander of the Sixth Division, rose when he saw me, and I was taken aback by the beauty of his gigantic body. He rose – his breeches purple, his raspberry-coloured cap cocked to the side, various military orders pinned to his chest – splitting the hut in ...”

“... had enormous social significance. Above all, it was more democratic than any other sport – it rose, pari passu, with the Reform Acts of 1867, 1884 and 1918. In rural England young working-class boys might rush after a muddy ball, but all the organised sports were under the control of their betters: they could watch their employers ride to hounds, shoot or ...”

“... getting shooed off by rangers. On their way back to the umiak they disturbed a brown bear, which rose up on its hind legs, roared and chased them to the boat. Back in Gloucestershire, Bob and Brian came upon an escaped panther in the woods and had to slink cautiously away. The natural order is big animals eating smaller ones, which is the reason Bob ...”

“... Ireland at one point, but lays off the bet by referring to me as ‘Hitch’ (which I like) and ‘Chris’ (which I don’t) to show that these things are all part of the general chummery. If Garland has an opinion of Conrad Black, he keeps it to himself, preferring the safer ground of other people’s eavesdropped speech. Charles Moore describes Black at a ...”

“... have bought a packet of seeds for every man, woman and child in Iraq. These agricultural credits rose inexorably through the Eighties, until they totalled a thousand million dollars a year. But that was nothing like enough to satisfy Saddam Hussein (or the greed of the people who supplied him). What he wanted was a bank in America with an open and endless ...”

“... and floated the notion that Cruz’s father was JFK’s assassin. The former New Jersey governor Chris Christie, who fancied himself a Tony Soprano boss with a Bruce Springsteen soul, endured fat jokes on stage from Trump, hardly a ballerina himself. The activation of Lindsey Graham’s salivary glands whenever he rises up on his hind legs in defence of ...”

“... third in the medals table, behind China and the US. Andy Murray won the US Open in tennis. Justin Rose won it in golf. This summer, Murray won Wimbledon and Chris Froome followed Wiggins to victory in the Tour de France. The cup ran over. There’s plenty of material for a different story, too. Woodward followed his world ...”