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“... to believe in a film until it actually happens, it does seem likely that this autumn we will be shooting The Lady in the Van. This is the story of Miss Mary Shepherd, the elderly eccentric who took up residence in my garden in 1974, living there in a van until her death 15 years later. Maggie Smith played Miss Shepherd on the stage in 1999 and all being ...”

“... who worked at Trnopolje, in northern Bosnia-Herzegovina. Trnopolje was a ‘labour camp’ run by the Serbs. Here they detained able-bodied Bosnian males, and assembled women, children, the elderly and the sick for transit. The doctor’s submission details many abuses which took place there, including rape and beatings. It also states that the staff at ...”

“... Guide to the Architecture of London. In 1983, they wrote of a city in decline, its population down by about a sixth from its postwar height. ‘London is cleaner and uglier than it was at the beginning of the century; but it is still cosmopolitan, multiracial and – thanks to its scattered structure – easy to live in.’ As for its architecture, ‘in the ...”

“... revolution; the opportunity to destabilise, embarrass and disable the old enemy could not be let slip, and if a bribe here and there could do it, he would be glad to have some revolutionaries in England’s pocket. Later, in 1793, the journalist Desmoulins would denounce the revolution of 1789 as a false ...”

“... an old boy of Leeds Grammar School, the snobbery of which is pilloried in some of his poems. By rights all such schools should be free schools, as indeed in the light of their origins, should many public schools. The nearest public school to us in Yorkshire is Giggleswick which started off as the local grammar ...”

“... Report. The figure was the size of the subsidy that taxpayers give to British banking just by virtue of being available to bail out banks if things go badly wrong. It was calculated by working out the value to banks of the difference between the two ratings now typically given to them ...”

“... in Afghanistan began with the raising of a proxy army. Although the invasion of Iraq was conducted by traditional armed divisions on a grand scale – nearly 180,000 troops from the US, UK, Australia and others – the occupation that followed devolved into an exercise in proxy management. The temptation to use direct military force to contend with the ...”

“... The name​ given to Phillis Wheatley by her family is lost. She may have been born in modern-day Senegal or Gambia, and was called ‘Phillis’ after the ship in which she was forcibly transported to Boston in 1761. Wheatley was the name of the prosperous merchant family who purchased her ‘for a trifle’ – ‘a slender, frail, female child, supposed to have been about seven years old, at this time, from the circumstances of shedding her front teeth’, and dressed in ‘a quantity of dirty carpet’, according to Margaretta Odell, an unreliable Victorian descendant of the Wheatleys ...”

“... Cage – and for being Elvis’s daughter. Before her death, in 2023, of cardiac arrest caused by complications from weight-loss surgery, she had been recording tapes of material for a memoir. These recordings form the basis of From Here to the Great Unknown, a memoir told in two voices – those of Lisa Marie and her daughter, the actress Riley Keough.On ...”

“... nominated for Oscars.When he was well cast and well directed, Newman’s macho stillness could be mesmerising. The most obvious example is Cool Hand Luke (1967), a prison drama superbly directed by Stuart Rosenberg, whose background was in television, in which he plays a prisoner, beautiful and insouciant in denim, who ...”

“... was cheap’. The family flitted between council housing and privately rented accommodation; by the age of six, Ruby had already gone to four different primary schools. When she turned eighteen, her father threw her out and she was forced to find a cheap flat of her own.‘I think of those days as my “Margate, mice and maggots” period,’ Ruby ...”

“... of two of the Catholic boys carrying the coffin of their father or their brother, murdered by the UVF in an effort to disrupt the talks. The hair is cut short at the front but selected locks are left a little longer to dangle over the forehead in an attenuated fringe. Somehow to see them both with these carefully considered haircuts makes the scene ...”

“... David Ben-Gurion​ , the founder of the state of Israel, was brooding, explosive, often on the verge of collapse: every obstacle he faced was a ‘catastrophe’. He dabbled in mysticism, consulted fortune-tellers, claimed to see flying saucers, and lived according to his whims. At one point he went on an unannounced holiday from his duties as prime minister to take driving lessons on the French Riviera; on another occasion, he spent a week studying Buddhism in Burma, and tried to persuade his teachers that he’d stumbled on a contradiction in their doctrine no one else had unearthed ...”

“... 4 January, Yorkshire. A heron fishes by the bridge as I walk down to get the papers this morning, but when I draw nearer it takes off and flaps up the beck. Not a rare bird, the heron’s size is never less than spectacular, and grey and white though they are they still seem exotic. Bitterly cold with snow forecast later so we get off early up the M6 to Penrith and Brampton, hoping to have a look at the Written Rock, a quarry by the river at Brampton with an inscription carved by the legion that cut the stone here for nearby Hadrian’s Wall ...”

“... on top of the Mount of Olives you walk down past Gethsemane to the city, taking the road used by Jesus: what other could he have used? This brings you near the Golden Gate, by which Messiah must enter: it is blocked off, and the Muslims have craftily established a graveyard in front of it, so that no priest can ...”