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“... This movement, exemplified by names like Heinlein, Asimov and Clarke, SF’s sturdy dead-white-guy canon, is where a fascination with technology and the future became mashed up with American exceptionalist ideology: technocratic triumphalism, Manifest Destiny, libertarian survivalist bullshit. Hard SF fuelled both the Cold War space race and Ronald ...”

“... literary and artistic worlds: his maternal grandfather was Ford Madox Brown, his uncle William Michael Rossetti. The only possible career for the children of these classes was that of a genius. Ford’s Rossetti cousins had written Greek dramas at the ages of five, nine and fourteen respectively. It became his duty always to aspire to consequence. ‘To me ...”

“... were hard, yellow apples filled with powerful juice. They exploded against the teeth, they spat white flecks like arguments.’ From the story ‘Am Strande von Tanger’, on the death of a bird: ‘A heart no bigger than an orange seed has ceased to beat.’ From his first novel, The Hunters of 1957, a description of fuel tanks jettisoned by ...”

“... the events, along with the record of various defining exchanges in 2001-02 between lawyers in the White House, the US Department of State and the Department of Defense discussing the Geneva protocols, interrogation techniques and POW categories, all of these preceded in the book by reprints of Danner’s own essays, published in the New York Review of Books ...”

“... are part-African’, Mechal Sobel argues that in 18th-century Virginia, despite the tyranny of white over black, cultural interaction occurred constantly. ‘Work became essentially a black domain, and working whites worked in it.’ On ‘King’ Carter’s estates in the 1730s, 1000 black slaves toiled under eight ...”

“... decades since Moss was photographed by Corinne Day for the Face, those instantly iconic black and white images of a skinny 16-year-old on Camber Sands, wearing no make-up and very few clothes, grinning through her freckles and pointy teeth, all at once so English, so ordinary and so glamorous. And it’s four decades since David Bowie – wearing a lot of ...”

“... Di and Dodi on their wedding day that never was. The couple are shown hand in hand: she in a white bridal gown, clutching a bouquet; he in a dark morning-suit with a carnation in his buttonhole. They both seem very happy – or, shall we say, they don’t in the least seem to mind having their heads mounted on some other couple’s torsos. Di might not ...”

“... back at Ian Watt’s book, for instance, to find that no woman novelist figures in his account. In Michael McKeon’s voluminous The Origins of the English Novel, 1600-1740 Eliza Haywood, Delarivier Manley and Mary Davys are disposed of in a couple of pages at the end of the ‘Stories of Virtue’ section (Jane Barker is not mentioned at all). The ...”

“... an obscure former one-term governor of Georgia, campaigned almost in secret and ended up in the White House. I come across voters here who have met four or five candidates; voters who have met the same candidate four times; activists who explain how they joined a campaign after hearing a particular candidate years ago. The presentation of the Presidential ...”

“... Milton Keynes is a direct descendant of Bloomsbury seems about as plausible as trying to show that Michael Foot speaks with the authentic voice of the Levellers. More fundamentally, the central argument of this book, that London’s homely architecture is the product and expression of Londoners’ homely virtues, is chronologically unsound. Most of the ...”

“... days often included professional and business men, but later came to be drawn primarily from the white-collar and lower middle class. The Brigade gave them an unrivalled opportunity for inculcating their highly-prized virtues of personal discipline and self-improvement, and for offering the urban teenage boy something better than a life of street-corner ...”

“... bitterness which his by then distant political activities had so frequently generated. As with the white cobra in Kipling’s ‘The King’s Ankus’, the fangs had long been harmless, the poison-sacs dried up. Yet Brougham had been a terror and a torment in his time. To Lord Sefton he was ‘the Archfiend’; Lady Grey, in a shrewder assessment, identified ...”

“... hearing the word “hypersonics”,’ one official remarked to an industry sponsored conference. Michael Griffin, undersecretary of defence for research and engineering, a hypersonics enthusiast, has spoken of the need for ‘maybe thousands’ of hypersonic weapons. ‘This takes us back to the Cold War,’ he announced cheerfully, ‘where at one point we ...”

“... Sacco, who worked in PR, tweeted: ‘Going to Africa. Hope I don’t get Aids. Just kidding. I’m white!’ During the 11-hour flight, she became the number one trending topic on Twitter. ‘No words for that horribly disgusting, racist as fuck tweet from Justine Sacco,’ one person tweeted. ‘Fascinated by the @JustineSacco train wreck. It’s global and ...”

“... The 1930s, the chronicler of American poverty Michael Harrington once said, ended in 1948, when the Cold War began to call into question the idea that democracy would lead to socialism. But by that definition, perhaps the 1930s didn’t really end until 11 September 1973, when Pinochet launched his coup against Salvador Allende, Chile’s democratically elected Marxist president, and Allende committed suicide in the national palace ...”