“... of binoculars and spyglasses as various members of the ruling class, foregathered on the roofs of North Audley Street, strove to catch the mood of the nation’s supposedly insurgent youth. The editor of the Daily Telegraph the next morning published some sort of ‘I was there’ piece in which he got all the slogans wrong, perhaps from listening through an ...”

“... between genes and a vast number of environmental variables. Moreover, philosophers from John Locke to Derek Parfit and John Perry have rightly insisted on the importance of the continuity of psychological states – experiences, memories, desires and intentions – to personal identity. Cloning raises deep ...”

“... permanently part of the United Kingdom is popular with the prosperous middle-class voters of North Down, or ‘the Gold Coast’ as it’s called. Surely they’ll back the No vote? But I’m not sure. My image for the Good Friday Agreement is a short, strong rubber band, the sort attached to a metal tent peg. Like one of those bands, it can stretch in ...”

“... Wisconsin with a population of around eight thousand. The state capital, Madison, is 34 miles north-west and Milwaukee about 60 miles away, east-northeast. Jonathan Williams, of Jargon Press, visited Niedecker in 1962, a year before her second marriage to Albert Millen and subsequent move to Milwaukee: Miss Niedecker, I guess in her fifties by now, lives ...”

“... ended in disaster, when his camp was ambushed. One of his three companions was killed; another, John Hanning Speke, was badly wounded; Burton himself was pierced through the cheek with a javelin. Undaunted, he set off the following year to find the ‘Great Lakes’ of eastern central Africa in which he believed the river began. Travelling in blackface was ...”

“... concerned with postwar Japan highly classified, in violation of its own laws. Most important, John Foster Dulles, President Truman’s special envoy to Japan charged with ending the occupation, wrote the peace treaty of 1951 in such a way that most former POWs and civilian victims of Japan are prevented from obtaining any form of compensation from either ...”

“... leftist Students for a Democratic Society), as well as members of the staunchly anti-Communist John Birch Society (named for an American missionary said to have been killed by Maoists in 1945) and Southern whites alienated by the federal government’s role in eliminating Jim Crow. All of them pegged their hopes on the Arizona Republican senator Barry ...”

“... and he wasn’t the only violent misogynist at large on the island. There was her former classmate John Stickney, a bomb enthusiast who blew himself up while stalking his ex-girlfriend. There was her near neighbour, George Waterfield Russell Jr, aka the Eastside Killer, who was apprenticing as a prowler and peeping Tom during the same period, before killing ...”

“... defendants (the journalists, Crispin Aubrey and Duncan Campbell, and the former signals corporal, John Berry) meditating passing any information to ‘the enemy’ – except (an important qualification) insofar as the British Security Services have always regarded the British public as the enemy. The ABC Trial was intended to be a sensational public show ...”

“... and Farm Aid, and Red Wedge, and Rock the Vote, and Live 8, Coldplay, U2, the late and the later John Lennon, and perhaps almost as many good causes as there are actors. It can only be a matter of time, surely, before Eminem turns, however briefly, to Christ and begins to walk in the way of righteousness, as Alice Cooper, Bob Dylan, Marvin Gaye, Roy ...”

“... and a respect for tradition I filch a couple of branches from the base of a balsam poplar on the north side of Regent’s Park. The buds are hardly open and thus are briefly heavily scented. Now in a glass on the sitting-room mantelpiece they bring a flavour to the room as they have done every spring for the last forty years.Easter Saturday, 4 ...”

“... travelling in Remainia. My aim was to write about St Albans in Hertfordshire, a city just north of London where voters and the local MP are out of sync on the wedge issue of the day. In 2016 the people of St Albans voted heavily to remain in the EU – among cities, St Albans was behind only Edinburgh, Cambridge, Oxford, Brighton and Glasgow in the ...”

“... this comic-horror flavour into 16th-century painting, but with new emphasis.He suggests that the North European custom of portraying all antique and biblical scenes as contemporary and local had already offered painters a way to make scenes of legendary violence refer to (and thus protest against) current violence. In the 15th century, for example, a Flemish ...”

“... country … The silence, I find, is a factor which has enabled the evil to spread.’ Likewise John Gordon, in the Sunday Express, who seized on John Gielgud’s arrest for importuning in 1953 as a chance to rip aside the ‘protective veil’ of delicacy around this ‘repulsive’ and ‘peculiarly ...”

“... hospitals in unmarked vans, and unloaded at back entrances. I heard about despair. I heard General John Abizaid, commander of US Central Command, say of the insurgents: ‘I don’t think that they’re growing. I think that they’re desperate.’ I heard about hope. I heard General Richard Myers, chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, say: ‘I came away ...”