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“... what amounted to pocket money. (He did better in this respect than the feeble-minded Mr Dick of David Copperfield, who is supplied with pocket money but not allowed to spend it.) Not long after becoming third earl, he fled from home for a brief period in the company of his Swiss valet, though whether this was an abduction or an elopement is hard to say. The ...”

“... to see Satie is not as a classical musician who failed to become a great composer, but as an art-rock star avant la lettre. His career contained all the phases of 1970s art-rock history, though not in the same order: a proggy occult phase, a glam phase, a Bryan Ferryish lounge pop phase, a Brian Enoish ambient phase, a ...”

“... happened next was the first bank run in the UK since the 19th century, the collapse of Northern Rock in September 2007 and its subsequent nationalisation. Northern Rock had an unusual business model in that instead of relying on customer deposits to meet its operational needs it borrowed money short-term on the financial ...”

“... David Gibson was a man stiff and parsonical; by all accounts the sort of man who got things done. You could say he was obsessed with ridding Glasgow of its slums, with turning them into something bright and high and unquestionably modern. That’s what he wanted, and he’d already made vast advances towards getting it when he became convener of Glasgow Corporation’s housing committee in 1964 ...”

“... over his life and over his conduct as a leader of the Revolution, and what is soon evident about David Lawday’s spirited and highly readable biography is that he stands Danton in a flattering light and pays insufficient attention to movements in the shadows. ‘The Gentle Giant of Terror’, the subtitle calls him: which suggests, along with revolutionary ...”

“... of sin. Is this ‘artful whiteface mockery of pious racists’? In his new biography of Wheatley, David Waldstreicher encourages us to think so, and to read the lines in a ‘mocking or satirical instead of a beseeching voice’, so that we can hear Wheatley ‘become the organic intellectual of the enslaved’.The poem shows Wheatley working within narrow ...”

“... some great authority to forbid change in her childhood homeland. The flanks of Penmaen, the ‘Big Rock’, have been thoroughly quarried and the summit (with its ancient fort) has been sliced off. ‘Who was first permitted to start removing this major aspect of the landscape?’ Again, ‘there are high-rise flats on the shores of Anglesey. Who let them do ...”

“... in half, the letters TU would be found written all the way through him, as in a stick of Brighton rock. Could all this add up to a vindication for those who thought that Tony Blair would become the first Labour leader in the Party’s history to move to the left once in power? Did Blair not promise in the last week of the election campaign that he would ‘be ...”

“... Israeli poet), Yehuda Amichai, Leah Goldberg, Moshe Dor, Shlomo Viner, Dahlia Ravikovitch and David Vogel; Oxford have published Amichai and Carcanet Pagis; Tony Rudolf and Howard Schwarz have recently edited an enormous volume of modern Jewish poetry, which includes a 300-page section on Hebrew poetry.* All these, of course, are in English only. But some ...”

“... wisdom in this country. In recent years Attlee’s reputation in Britain has risen from near rock bottom to dizzy heights. As leader of the Labour Party for twenty years, Churchill’s deputy during the Second World War, and Prime Minister from 1945 to 1951, Attlee had many claims to fame. But in his lifetime he was written off by the Westminster mafia ...”

“... knowledge of the material they were extracting and also pick up the warnings of danger that the rock could give. Mostly they had to work in near darkness, relying on touch and hearing rather than sight. Pits were increasingly dangerous places until in 1815 the Davy lamp enabled miners to have light without the risk of causing an explosion, and even then ...”

“... Summers’s vastly enjoyable and revealing book, we find J. Edgar Hoover’s lovely home in Rock Creek Park being done up at taxpayers’ expense, complete with ‘hand-crafted fruit bowl’ and ‘a heated toilet seat, invented in the FBI laboratory. When he decided it was either a quarter of an inch too high or too low, it had to be redone.’ One ...”

“... the object’s ‘function in a given human environment’ that mattered. A story was ‘like a rock or a refrigerator’, Barthelme said, because he could imagine a reader approaching it, ‘tapping it, shaking it, holding it to his ear to hear the roaring within’; in other words, ‘reconstituting’ it ‘by his active participation’. Many of his ...”

“... a Promethean stealer of automotive fire, chained to his own inarticulate drives as one bound to a rock; a winged messenger-god in a Mercury; a naked Eros. In Campbell’s account of the legend, the last of these figures is rampant. Cassady appears here under the double aspect of danger and desire. The importance of his role, allowing the spectator Kerouac to ...”

“... sick and tired of? How do you remain the party of business and a party of the majority when, as David Rockefeller complained, ‘people are blaming business and the enterprise system for all the problems of our society’? How to finesse the passage of regulatory legislation in the areas of occupational health and safety, the environment and consumer ...”