“... and to study new Cubist work. ‘It’s good for me to be here,’ he told the artist Simon Maris. ‘Everything big and grand, eh?’ By the beginning of 1912, he had sold some old paintings for cash and found a tiny room in Montparnasse. Not that it was a straightforward exit. In Amsterdam he left behind him a string of much younger women, one ...”

“... Everything else will be diffused to the community. Loosely directed by the head of NHS England, Simon Stevens, money, staff and new investment are being directed towards primary care – family doctors, community nurses, souped-up local clinics, systems to help the chronically unwell live at home. In universe two a counter-reality prevails: the reality of ...”

“... for the closed material procedure. Those who spoke in favour of the amendments included Lord Simon Brown, who had sat on the Al Rawi case in the Supreme Court. He concluded a carefully reasoned speech by claiming that closed hearings are of course a price worth paying in a tiny handful of cases that cannot otherwise ...”

“... can make a good living in the media by attacking their ex-comrades – I’d do it myself if the price was right.’) George Monbiot, the Guardian columnist and anti-capitalist campaigner, started looking at the group closely in 1997, after some of them contributed to Against Nature, the notorious anti-Green television documentary; over the years he has ...”

“... Unfathomable would be a better way of putting it. In France, the state buys homes at full market price in a band of 150 metres on either side of land affected by a scheme of national importance, but in the UK only those within a very narrow band – 60 metres on either side – qualify. An exceptional hardship scheme designed to compensate those outside this ...”

“... stone was laid on 18 March 1903. The official opening was on 25 June 1904. Ian Gordon and Simon Inglis’s book Great Lengths: The Historic Indoor Swimming Pools of Britain tells us that E.J. Wakeling, vice chairman of the Shoreditch Baths and Washhouses Committee, animated the occasion by plunging into the pool and swimming a 100-foot length ...”

“... genre also includes Thomas Dekker’s Shoemakers’ Holiday (1599), in which the jovial shoemaker Simon Eyre is enabled to get rich and become lord mayor of London thanks to his willingness to take on a Dutch workman, who tips him off about a well priced cargo of imports. ‘Hans’ is really an English aristocrat called Rowland Lacy, disguised with an accent ...”

“... nil-nil, with the hunger of the goalmouth. He would be unable to endorse the words of me song by Simon and Garfunkel ‘I’d rather be a hammer than a nail’, feeling himself (as he confessed to one of his girlfriends) simultaneously both. And in a different context he would be concerned with the current debate on the disposal of nuclear waste. To be ...”

“... for a presidency so cynical and void of ideas. Barre or Rocard, admired by the Fondation Saint-Simon, would have been preferable.Behind this disaffection, however, lay a deeper doubt about the direction that French public life was taking. Already by the late 1980s, Furet had started to express reservations about the discourse of human rights that was ...”

“... when it came to the primary political battle of her life, which was to defeat socialism. When Simon Jenkins, then the editor of the Times, went to interview Thatcher at Chequers in the run-up to the leadership contest, he saw a copy of Heseltine’s latest book on the coffee table, stuffed with post-it notes. She told him she had been marking up what she ...”

“... can’t have bombs going off, Harold. We can’t have corpses.’ But that, unfortunately, is the price in the catalogue. Spontaneous public celebration, dancing, hugging, shoulder-punching in the studios, then private grief, explosions on the Underground. Mutilation, carnage. A fluster of bacofoil suits and on-message medallists bouncing up and down as the ...”

“... woman’s flat’: ‘I washed my hands and the smell lasted for two days.’At the end of 1960 Simon Raven wrote a remarkable piece for Encounter on male prostitutes in London, distinguishing five types with the alert eye of a Mayhew addressing an undescribed trade. He deduces that all come from homes where they were unwanted or misunderstood. There are ...”

“... magnificent teeth’, who was then working in Washington alongside the distinguished astronomer Simon Newcombe. Her 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 ...”

“... down as the crowd went past the window of Chestertons, the estate agents, where the average house price was £3.6 million. ‘We want justice!’ ‘We want Paget-Brown!’ ‘Murderers!’ They got to the town hall and gathered round the entrance. ‘Get them out!’ they shouted, many of them with their phones raised. ‘This was murder by central and local ...”