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“... is a sore head or a streaky patch on a window. Find the remedy, and it’s gone. Limbo dancing, Peter Hain’s sideburns, the Angry Brigade, King Crimson: these films are always so good on perky period souvenirs, so skilled at avoiding most emotions apart from the fake ones. Though actually, I wasn’t impressed by the period detail in Misbehaviour ...”

“... stories stand out is an indication that education does not work in this way for the majority.Peter Mandler​ ’s book The Crisis of the Meritocracy does not directly address these conceptual issues, but instead draws from official statistics, social surveys, longitudinal studies and similar sources in an effort to answer one specific historical ...”

“... a threshold Yeltsin’s regime was unable to cross. Moscow boasts more billionaires than New York, yet a flat income tax of 13 per cent has been introduced, at Yegor Gaidar’s urging. A highly regressive ‘unified social tax’ falls on those who can least afford it. Welfare benefits have been monetised and slashed. Key economic ministries remain in ...”

“... to wartime Moscow on Guy Burgess’s initiative, to find himself stranded and unwanted in New York instead. But, when told to make the best of his American contacts, he found himself in the perfect milieu. Ignatieff’s passages on this period are excellent. Berlin’s networking skills and, it’s not unfair to say, his ability to be all things to all ...”

“... sister of two leading Yiddish actors, Maurice and Fanny Waxman, whose roles on the London and New York stages included Hamlet and Medea. My father was born in Newcastle-upon-Tyne, grew up in Darlington, and always had a slight Northern accent. He was one of a large family: Abe; then Bec, the one girl; then my father, Philip, called Phil but Phishel at ...”

“... an arch with a kink at one end like a giant dog ball thrower, is, according to its designer Peter Jenkins, the first of its kind in the world. ‘I’d like to think that George Stephenson would have approached the challenge in a similar manner, laying the new railway infrastructure over the old,’ he told the Manchester Evening News. Even the Chinese ...”

“... as illustration. One day Franco Moretti and Carlo Ginzburg went to the Metropolitan Museum in New York together. Coming upon Vermeer’s A Maid Asleep, depicting a servant-girl drowsing at a table laden with fruit, a wine-glass lying on its side, a painting of Cupid on the wall above, and an empty chair half-swung towards a door half-open, implying the recent ...”

“... construction industry, bent coppers and old-style Kray hoodlums making overtures to the New York Mafia with their lawyers specialising in property and gambling tax. Much of this was documentary refraction: it had happened, it was happening, and it described the future we are now experiencing. According to a persistent urban myth, the gang that robbed ...”

“... resources and surveillance time monitoring such well-known left-wing subversives as Jack Straw and Peter Mandelson, as well as CND and Vietnam War protesters. More important, from a counter-terrorist perspective, it was deeply involved in the British state’s confrontation with modern Irish Republican terrorism. Until 1992, the Met Special Branch had sole ...”

“... pointed out, this arrangement is almost bound to have socially regressive effects. Brown quotes Peter Scott, the former vice-chancellor of Kingston University: ‘To rely on A-level grades alone is, in effect, further to privilege the already privileged, to give disproportionate rewards to those whose way in life has been smooth. The correlation between ...”

“... in positions of power. It also takes place on the street. Vanessa Grigoriadis, a writer at the New York Times Magazine, had often been whistled at and cat-called as she walked through the city, but when researching her book on sexual harassment on campus in 2016, she noticed that men seemed to be stopping and harassing her even more than usual. Her father was ...”

“... Italian political science. A country that has translated scarcely anything of Fredric Jameson or Peter Wollen, and could not even find a publisher for Eric Hobsbawm’s Age of Extremes, might well be termed a rearguard in the international exchange of ideas.Yet if we turn to arts and letters, the picture is reversed. French literature itself may have ...”

“... of the last-mentioned one day and informed me – with a strange stare – that Julian Bream and Peter Pears were ‘pansies’.) In my current technological fix, however, it was obvious that the ancient family sound machine wasn’t up to much. The boombox was still non compos mentis. Forced to adopt emergency measures – under normal circumstances I ...”

“... versions of events. She and her husband adored the old two-room private flat they rented in St Peter’s Avenue, and fought a long, bitter and unsuccessful battle with the council to prevent it and the neighbouring homes being knocked down. ‘It was a lovely house,’ she said. ‘These days they would have done them up because when you go down Columbia ...”

“... The earlier novels of Forster were written in the same decade as James’s prefaces to the New York Edition of his novels. One might have expected the youthful Forster to be impressed by these remarkable exercises. For example, rereading What Maisie Knew elicited from the fluent master a full account of the genesis and maturing of his story, with special ...”