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“... patently absurd, it is impossible to understand the attitude of some of those involved – such as Neil Kinnock – without appreciating that a weaker version of the argument does have a certain intuitive appeal. The case for going on subsidising uneconomic pits rests on two propositions. First, production of North Sea oil will peak next year or very soon ...”

“... crowed over: You overreached yourself, Patroclus.   Yes, my darling, Not only God was out that day but Lord Apollo. ‘You know Apollo loves the Trojans ... ’ The point is emphasised on the next page with enlarged typography and later by a double page with APOLLO’S name Pounding across it in huge block capitals, like Chinese characters in The ...”

“... and physically (he got into a number of fist fights at Oxford). He also had what another brother, Neil, described as ‘intense superficial sentimentality’, allowing himself to be overcome by gusts of skin-deep emotion. He was clearly encouraged by the notion that Churchill (whom he knew well) had a personality somewhat similar to his own. It was a fatal ...”

“... the not very saintly Saint Olaf. We hear nothing of them from the British Museum, and in the book Neil Price has only two pages on ‘The Way of the Warrior’, one of them devoted to challenging ‘the idea that “proper” Vikings were necessarily male’. It’s true that the literary evidence provides examples of female heroism, and of noble female ...”

“... The next year produced both Carter’s film The Company of Wolves, a horror story directed by Neil Jordan, in which the heroine turns into a wolf, and Nights at the Circus, whose winged protagonist is, as Carter emphasises, ‘a big girl’. Her misjudged but reiterated contempt for Penelope Fitzgerald, who won the Booker Prize in 1979, was perhaps of a ...”

“... parents were just undemonstrative as I remember nothing comparable to the pride of the parents of Neil Kinnock, for instance, when he passed the 11+ (and so wouldn’t have to go down the mine). I can’t even remember taking the exam except that my friend (and alphabetical neighbour on the school register) Albert Benson passed it with me but was too poor to ...”

“... The explosive potential of The State and Revolution can’t be overestimated: in its pages, as Neil Harding wrote in Leninism (1996), ‘the vocabulary and grammar of the Western tradition of politics was abruptly dispensed with.’ What followed can be called, borrowing the title of Althusser’s text on Machiavelli, la solitude de Lenine: a time when he ...”

“... going to be a case of ‘ghastly thro’ the drizzling rain,/On the bald street breaks the blank day.’ What was surprising, then, was that some Leavers too were a little fractious. Even before Big Ben had failed, as it turned out, to bong in celebration of the UK’s deliverance (Northern Ireland only sort of), there were spots of disillusion already ...”

“... a community and the failings of a welfare state. Venables and Thompson re-enacted something that day: they played out a fantasy of watching and being watched. Much of what they did – ‘let’s steal a kid,’ Thompson said – was based on a fantasy drawn from a home video they’d seen together, Child’s Play 3, a story about a psychotic killer-doll ...”

“... what has usually been ignored and often denied: the female capacity for successful aggression. Neil Kinnock always used to claim that his ability to attack Thatcher at Prime Minister’s Question Time was sapped by natural chivalry in the face of a woman. This was self-serving nonsense. What defeated him, and so many others, was the fact that she was a ...”

“... incompatible.’ A.J. Ayer condemned him for having an idea of socialism that ‘resembles present-day America’, while another critic sneered that there was ‘a jukebox struggling to get out of him’. Yet so far from seeking sameness, his book can be read as a path-breaking socialist plea for choice: a Fabian tract that rejected asceticism in favour of a ...”

“... which had now captured the block votes. Benn recorded that it was ‘the end of a historic day – the product of ten years’ work’. The Labour Movement had asserted itself against the Parliamentary Party, and purged itself of the Gang of Four in the process. Since the SDP was hardly more than a creature of the media – ‘the BBC is now the voice ...”

“... exploitative. Names that come up in this context tend to be better known to mainstream audiences: Neil LaBute, Michael Haneke, Lars Von Trier. But it’s Nelson’s thoughts about the stuff that flickers in the middle that bears most directly on writers of memoir. The idea, for example, that if we can see the artist is suffering, that makes it OK that the ...”

“... a ship to take him back to France. The young man put in charge of his safety was Flora’s cousin Neil MacEachen, who later changed his name to Macdonald. (He had a brave and remarkable life as a courier for the Jacobite resistance, a novelist and – in French exile – the father of Marshal Étienne Macdonald, one of Napoleon’s most formidable ...”

“... the wind and the multi-year cycles of the moon’s orbit. Invasion and retreat happen twice a day, and the difference between high and low tides on the British coast – 6.38 metres in Boston in 2022 – is many times larger than the anticipated sea-level increase from global warming. The south-east Lincolnshire fenland has seen radical natural changes in ...”