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“... wrote in Texts for Nothing that ‘it’s the end gives the meaning to words.’ The title of the Davis and Butler symposium comes from the ending of Beckett’s play What Where (1983) –Time passes.That is all.Make sense who may.I switch off.– and Beckett continues to throw the switch on and off, in an ever-prolonged vigil or wake at which he is both ...”

“... of debate. There were stakes involved, positions taken, lines drawn. I would rather not have known.Robin DiAngelo opens her book Nice Racism with an anecdote that reminded me of these playground encounters. She describes going for dinner with a Black couple while at university. Desperate to show that she wasn’t racist – ‘At this point in my life, I had ...”

“... Labour candidate for the safe seat of desperately impoverished Dunfermline East, he co-edited with Robin Cook another series of socialist essays, The Great Divide. In his Introduction, he grappled with the familiar argument that the shocking conditions of the poor could only be improved in times of economic growth. ‘The era of economic growth,’ he ...”

“... Nowhere does he acknowledge this. He even writes with some pride of the resolution he and David Davis proposed, and which the House of Commons carried, criticising the ruling by the European Court of Human Rights which held that depriving prisoners of the vote was a denial of their human rights. Straw stood to gain nothing politically from this ...”

“... might be a recognition of that fact. If, however, his resignation is simply to make way for David Davis, then nothing has been learned. The Conservatives would do well to think harder next time: the old xenophobic parochialism which once did so well for them has weakened as the Conservative working class has disappeared. This culture’s disarray can be ...”

“... In a lovely 1963 piece on Miles Davis, Kenneth Tynan quoted Cocteau to illuminate the art of his ‘discreet, elliptical’ subject: Davis was one of those 20th-century artists who had found ‘a simple way of saying very complicated things’. Jump to 1966 and the meatier, beatier sound of a UK Top 20 hit, the Who’s ‘Substitute’, a vexed, stuttering anti-manifesto, with its self-accusatory boast: ‘The simple things you see are all complicated!’ You couldn’t find two more different musical cries: Davis’s liquid tone is hurt, steely, recessive, where Townshend’s is upfront, impatient, hectoring ...”

“... at war with property, and property emerged victorious. There are pieces that celebrate images of Robin Hood, empathise with vagabonds and extol gypsies. Hill’s spotlight shines on radical sectaries who defied both the laws of England and the laws of Moses. Villainous lords, greedy merchants and corrupt lawyers lurk in the shadows. The perspective is one of ...”

“... in one’s attention and ends by sending one to sleep.’ And in his introduction Stanley Clinton Davis comments: ‘the pollution of the seas is not principally a scientific or an economic problem. It is a political problem.’ The late Barbara Ward tackled global green issues on the plane of international politics: the rate at which the rich nations ...”

“... jocular, know-your-place remarks of the sort made by Michael Fallon to Andrea Leadsom, or by David Davis of Diane Abbott. In the 1979 general election, which brought the Conservatives to power under Margaret Thatcher – something Harman describes as an ‘excruciating blow’ – 19 women were elected, the lowest postwar figure aside from the 17 elected in ...”

“... This, pioneered in French by Le Roi Ladurie (Montaillou, 1975), and in English by Natalie Zemon Davis (The Return of Martin Guerre, 1983) and Robert Darnton (The Great Cat Massacre, 1984), involves giving a detailed description of events in the lives of ordinary people and is almost always based on court records – A Trial of Witches is a good, The ...”

“... only major public commission the Smithsons had to wait until the late 1960s, when they built the Robin Hood Gardens estate in Poplar, East London. An attempt to create Corbusian ‘streets in the sky’ and put their social theories into practice by force majeure, it had a certain conceptual dignity but was never a practical success. Soon after it was ...”

“... in 2009 to mark the fortieth anniversary of Cottam power station in Nottinghamshire, Robert Davis quotes one of the employees: There was so much wastage during the CEGB days. It was like they had money to burn. The stores were always full and we had spares for everything. Bureaucracy was part of the problem. If you signed stuff out of the stores, even ...”

“... won’t be seen doing any housework – not even wiping fingerprints off doorknobs; Spunk Davis, health-freak and charity worker, has demanded a no-decadence clause in his contract; Caduta Massi has a thing about fertility and wants the script to supply her with some extra offspring. In Doris Arthur’s finished screenplay, Lorne is senile, a sexual ...”

“... of celebrity femininity: he writes about the heartaches of Joan Crawford, Jane Fonda and Bette Davis; imagines Barbara Hutton taken in a white silk crib to the White House followed by five hundred devotees; pictures Marlene Dietrich moving ‘majestically down the avenue to guard over/the war-torn refugees, waifs who lined the house’. Barbara Stanwyck is ...”

“... the bill [hanging all sorts of unrelated measures onto a central spine], as Robin Cook used to call it.’ He could hardly be more candid than that. The last time the securocrats got so far with their assault on liberty was the introduction of internment in Northern Ireland in 1971. This was a disaster, for two reasons: a. it radicalised ...”