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“... Ursula’s life resembles John Aspinall’s in certain respects. Each is an eccentric. Each is a grand or smart person, of an equivocal kind. Each of these narratives has a Douglas-Home, and there are some similar fatalities. Aspinall is the son of parted parents, a ‘pseudo-orphan’ who rapidly became larger than life. He is by far the more convivial ...”

“... version of Uncle Tom’s Cabin, D.W. Griffith’s 1915 The Birth of a Nation, The Jazz Singer, and David O. Selznick’s 1939 super-production Gone with the Wind ‘provide the scaffolding for American film history’ – although it takes us no further than the eve of the Second World War. This reading of Hollywood is anticipated by Leslie Fiedler’s ...”

“... interests in the postwar decades, but the Cold War meant that much more was retained, while the grand total of publicly owned land was increased by the nationalisation of coal mines and railways, the creation of the NHS and New Towns, and the spread of local authority housing schemes. In big cities, the proportion of public land varied between 33 per cent ...”

“... rules is seen as old-fashioned nonsense.In 2010 an early list of the quangos to be abolished by David Cameron’s new coalition included the administrative branch of the Supreme Court. Now even more direct threats have been made, with government supporters openly questioning the need for such an adjudicative body and various reviews being conducted into ...”

“... refuser (1853). Perhaps the two portrayals are not coincidental. In 1851, the Melville family read David Copperfield aloud as their evening entertainment. The pre-20th-century office worker saw himself as a cut above the unsalaried labouring masses, and was as ambivalent about his superiors, who were his only means of rising, as the rest of the working world ...”

“... in its history) and Northern Arts. The scoutmaster was elbowed aside by a strange new act: the Grand Old Man, the English Celt (listen to the recording of Briggflatts). Oxford published his Collected Poems in 1978, and a posthumous Uncollected Poems in 1991. He continued to be shunted around from house to house (he never seemed to find rest or ...”

“... envisaged both by Article 53 of the convention and by Section 11 of the Human Rights Act itself. David Cameron advocates replacement of the Human Rights Act with a bill of rights and responsibilities entrenched against repeal. Gordon Brown advocates a new constitutional document ‘in parallel’, as the recent green paper puts it, with a bill of rights and ...”

“... strictly experimental or popular but both, like Fritz Lang, Stanley Kubrick, Roman Polanski and David Cronenberg. Also distinctive is his selection of novelists; his semi-paranoid view of our ‘techno-institutional worlds’ leads Crary to turn to Thomas Pynchon, Philip K. Dick and J.G. Ballard.In 1982, Crary published a brilliant essay on horror ...”

“... the practical work of bringing the new idea to reality – a point Sisman makes well. The only grand schemes to which he stayed loyal and (with interruptions) committed were the new University of Sussex and the Open University, of which he was chancellor from 1978 to 1994.His own politics were flexible: left or leftish. It’s impossible to imagine the ...”

“... at the dilapidated Hillsborough Stadium in Sheffield. The officer in charge, chief superintendent David Duckenfield, was grossly underprepared. When a crush developed at the entrance for Liverpool fans shortly before kick-off, Duckenfield refused to delay the start time, but belatedly opened one of the exit gates, letting fans flood into the Liverpool ...”

“... writer Philip Coggan, and in Debt: The First 5000 Years by the anthropologist and activist David Graeber, which situates the same stretch of modern history within the vast tidal shifts, across five millennia of Eurasian history, between monetary regimes founded on precious metals and those based on ‘virtual credit money’. In August 1971, Nixon ...”

“... Furedi hardly engaged at all with what actually happens inside British schools. There were instead grand-looking historical generalisations – ‘in the 21st century, conservation of the past is a radical act’ – and a lot of anecdotes of the sort that make people start going on about political correctness gone mad: ‘They’re even expelling ...”

“... Mythology of the Secret Societies (1972) illuminated much, but not the movement’s origins. Now David Stevenson can claim to have clarified these considerably, in a work of creative scholarship flavoured by exceptional candour and gusto. His subtitle gives his gist. In the 17th century, such characteristic features of Freemasonry as the local Lodge ...”

“... as a highly special unity, congratulating itself on a mythic journey through two centuries to a grand point of arrival in the present. In May the Queen will open the new Parliament House in Canberra: designed by an Italian working from New York, it’s one of our more interesting public buildings since the Sydney Opera House (designed, as far as they’d ...”

“... such as Dostoevsky, who offer the deepest objections to their own belief. The parable of the Grand Inquisitor, in The Brothers Karamazov, is an unanswerable attack on the cruelty of God’s hiddenness. In my early twenties, it proved decisive. Kierkegaard writes, in Works of Love, that the true Christian preacher ‘should not hesitate, aware of the ...”