“... should exercise greater care. (Incidentally, no context is given when he mentions Gary Glitter and Jonathan King, both of whom were later found guilty of sexually abusing minors.)Wham! signed off with a show at Wembley in 1986. By then, Prince was the paradigm. In ‘I Would Die 4 U’ he sang ‘I’m not a woman, I’m not a man/I am something that you’ll ...”

“... Lula took power we were toothless,’ Luis Humberto of the federal police union told Jonathan Watts of the Guardian. ‘The Workers’ Party increased our budget, upgraded our equipment and gave us more authority. It is ironic. They lost power because they did the right thing.’Car Wash has become intensely politicised in Brazil, making it easy ...”

“... some of the books and papers so that it can be used for the filming.I first saw the house in 1968. Jonathan Miller lives in the same street and Rachel, his wife, saw the ‘For Sale’ sign go up. It belonged to an American woman who kept parrots and there were perches in the downstairs room and also in its small garden. Slightly older than the other houses in ...”

“... David Runciman, Neal Ascherson, James Butler, T.J. Clark, Jonathan Coe, Sionaidh Douglas-Scott, Daniel Finn, Dawn Foster, Jeremy Harding, Colin Kidd, Ross McKibbin, Philippe Marlière, James Meek, Pankaj Mishra, Jan-Werner Müller, Susan Pedersen, J.G.A. Pocock, Nick Richardson, Nicholas Spice, Wolfgang Streeck, Daniel TrillingDavid RuncimanSo who​ is to blame? Please don’t say the voters: 17,410,742 is an awful lot of people to be wrong on a question of this magnitude ...”

“... came across Dora in the company of her daughter, Daphne, ‘aged sixteen: a nice, sleek-headed, brown-eyed girl; in a mackintosh’. The slight pause created by the semi-colon casts a quizzical eye on a garment felt to be ever so slightly peculiar.What Woolf needed, at this juncture, was the kind of character who could be relied on to give her ...”

“... box. When I get to the village I find that one of these pensioners was our ex-postman Maurice Brown. I ask him whether the Queen spoke to him. ‘No. She only stopped at people who had something wrong with them. I haven’t, so she just gave me the money.’29 March, Yorkshire. Easter Saturday and an appropriately monastic day out, going first via ...”

“... Asians who, like me, grew up in areas of England such as Horsham or Cheam or Gloucester, where brown faces were scarce became increasingly embarrassed by our parents’ accents, by their insistence that we wear outdated polyester clothes and drench our hair in coconut oil before going out. It was easy to forget the love and care that made them do this. We ...”

“... entertaining in their house in Merrion Square. Shaw remembered William Wilde ‘dressed in stuffy brown; and as he had the sort of skin that never even looks clean, he produced a dramatic effect beside Lady Wilde (in full fig) if being, like Frederick the Great, Beyond Soap and Water, as his Nietzschean son was beyond Good and Evil.’ Harry Furniss wrote ...”

“... were famously relaxed about people either making pots of money or having fun with it (Gordon Brown was another story). The members of Budd’s commission included the political philosopher Jonathan Wolff and the sports journalist Mihir Bose. The report they produced in 2001, for the newly created Department for ...”

“... been a different sort of politician, but that he might not really be a politician at all. When Jonathan Freedland interviewed him recently for the Guardian, he started by asking: ‘Are you a writer who became a politician, rather than a politician who’s done some writing?’ ‘Great question,’ Obama replied.What else might he have been? A law ...”

“... entrance. Everyone on the train looked terribly prosperous, clean and peaceful as they read about Jonathan King and the Nias earthquake in the Standard. It is amazing to watch the skill with which three people can stand in a rocking train, in a space less than two metres square, without touching each other, and read their papers without falling over. At Baker ...”

“... through Facebook accounts, until a second message told me he had swapped his father’s surname, Brown, for his mother’s, Lindsay. I typed in ‘William Lindsay’ and there he was: a boy in a EA7 bomber jacket with headphones round his neck, flaming hair and a lopsided smile.When I got back to Glasgow, I learned why my contact had risked his job to give ...”

“... eight. At the weekends, when you see them with the children, they go to heroic lengths – as Jonathan Coe points out in The Closed Circle – to occupy themselves doing exactly the same things they would be doing if the children weren’t there: reading papers, sending emails, talking on the phone. When the children are small the wives occupy themselves ...”

“... wrote to him after his first victory to congratulate him on his success he was, in the words of Jonathan Powell, his chief of staff (and Charles’s brother), ‘absolutely thrilled’. He wrote back to say that he would ‘like to meet soon. There is much I would like to talk about, with you.’ When Gordon Brown became ...”

“... parents had reservations when the couple got engaged in 1878: he had no notable ancestors, save Jonathan Edwards (who was only a distant relation); his means were modest and there was a family history of mental illness. Mabel, however, found it in herself to overlook all this. Her first requirement in a husband was sympathy to her ambitions. ‘No man can ...”