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“... The cultural compendiousness of ‘Postwar British’ and ‘World’s End’, dedicated to Neil Rennie, both of which have something of Rennie’s anthropological intelligence. The deployment, for once, of a more formal vocabulary in ‘Going Round Afterwards’ and the fine elegiac sequence for Hugh Williams, ‘Death of an Actor’, where the ...”

“... and bars, sometimes observed clutching at park railings as he made his unsteady way home after a day’s drinking. With such fame as he then enjoyed arising from his newspaper work rather than his more or less forgotten novels, the columns became ever less exuberant and ever more tetchy and cynical. As Joseph O’Connor wrote: ‘His fate, at least I think ...”

“... I began reading these books on a long-haul flight. Passengers were also handed copies of that day’s Financial Times. It was 18 April and the paper’s centre pages were devoted to the imminent bankruptcy of General Motors. Unnerved by receiving a mere $13.4 billion from US taxpayers, the company’s chief executive, Fritz Henderson, was reported as ...”

“... on which to lead, as full of purple prose today as it was twenty years ago. It should be a good day for sales. To the Express, the Mail and the Mirror, sales are important. Together they sold over twelve million copies every day in the early Sixties. Twenty-five years later, they sell not much over half of that, and the ...”

“... defended the police and their new powers, saying that people have the right ‘to go about their day-to-day lives without facing serious disruption’. ‘Serious disruption’ – a phrase that appears 94 times in the Public Order Act – now legally includes many of the mildest tactics used by activist groups from the ...”

“... charges while the staff, who are actually at death’s grip with them, hour after hour and day after day, are supposed to represent ‘hierarchy’. Well might Dr Rae suggest that ‘public school headmasters are political animals.’ But he is less than frank in his characterisation of the species. ‘Whatever other ...”

“... to come less than 2 per cent behind. At Airdrie and Shotts, in post-industrial Lanarkshire, Alex Neil of the SNP spectacularly broke through to seize the constituency from Labour by a majority of 2000. Airdrie was once coal and shale-oil mining, Shotts was coal and a great ironworks. I have known Alex as a friend for many years; son and grandson of South ...”

“... rates, municipalise utilities, take out vast loans and allocate city funds. Now he might start the day waiting anxiously for a ministerial Rover and spend the rest of it shuffling a Parliamentary Under Secretary around crumbling city ‘no-go areas’ in the hope of some beneficence from Whitehall departments. And he wouldn’t get any money until he’d ...”

“... to Gatwick to chant: ‘Don’t unpack, you must go back.’ In local elections on 6 May (the same day as the Mirror’s story), the Front’s 168 candidates secured an average vote of 8.9 per cent. During a Commons debate in July, John Stokes, the Conservative MP for Halesowen and Stourbridge, a former admirer of General Franco and a supporter of the Monday ...”

“... looking at her Twitter sometimes, and I saw grim stuff on it that I can’t check now, because a day or two after Deborah’s death her posts – ‘her support network and her playground,’ in the words of her great friend Suzanne Moore – disappeared. And I can’t check the posts that started appearing last summer, about terrible back pain, useless ...”

“... however much future historians may discover which is unknown to the commentators of the present day, and however right or wrong Blair may be in believing that they will be kind to him, it is unlikely that either his committed admirers or his committed detractors will be led to change their views. To his admirers, his ten-year tenure as prime minister is ...”

“... The shortest day of the year. We perch on the saddle of a promontory jutting west out of Anglesey into the Celtic Sea and look down into Wen Zawn – the white inlet. It seethes, the waves lift slow and bulky and burst suddenly, propelled by a force-8 gale. Rain hits our anoraks like grapeshot, pelmets of fog lour and droop on South Stack lighthouse, the airstream throws us off-balance and makes breathing difficult if you face into the wind ...”

“... Penelope summons Juliet. ‘It’s time,’ she writes. But when Juliet arrives on the appointed day, Penelope has vanished. The news is related with covert, gleeful hostility by the woman who runs the Spiritual Balance Centre – you know the type instantly. But this is the problem. She’s a caricature, just like Don, the Christian minister who appears ...”

“... on social media platforms to the vast archive of emails and tweets to which we contribute day after day. This massive quantity of information sits there, ready to be interpreted, if only something coherent can be extracted from the fog. It makes possible a new, panoramic way to assess people, now that evidence of ...”

“... recently represented: the City of London, big business, the Union, even Whitehall. To paraphrase Neil Kinnock, how did we end up in the grotesque chaos of a Conservative government – a Conservative government – setting about the seemingly deliberate demolition of the United Kingdom and its economy? From a Tory perspective, things must have reached a ...”