“... five years, while the bulbous and rusty bow of hull 802 had loomed above the shipyard’s entrance gates for almost as long. If the terms of the contract had been met, both vessels would have been at sea since 2018, hull 801 on the run from Ardrossan to Brodick on Arran, hull 802 working the so-called ‘Uig triangle’, from Uig on Skye to the islands of ...”

“... and she went in search of him. At a pub near Avondale Square she met a friend of Ronnie’s called David. He said he’d been with Ronnie the day before and that Ronnie was in bed the last time he saw him. (The coroner would later describe this man as an ‘unsavoury witness’ without detailing why.) Mrs Pinn, in company with another boy from the bar, went to ...”

“... 12 June, the arrows indicated that the German army was twenty miles from Paris. (Not on the map, David and Wallis Windsor leaving France in a convoy of cars loaded with their luggage.) Harriet and Clarencesaw that the illuminations had been switched off in the Cismigiu. The park, where people walked in summer until all hours, was now silent and deserted, a ...”

“... subsidy. The company trying to raise money for the Metropolitan was on the verge of collapse. David Wire, the lord mayor, allowed himself to be persuaded by Pearson – then the Corporation of the City of London’s solicitor – of the case for public transport in the capital, the one that’s still being made today. Wire accepted that something needed ...”

“... played on a prisoner lucky enough to be released from a concentration camp, presenting him at the gates with the bill. We ought to know the name of the official who dreamed up this little wheeze so as to watch out for him in a forthcoming Honours List. As it is we can only be grateful that Nelson Mandela wasn’t imprisoned in England or he would have been ...”

“... joke about a crowd of Germans pouring out of a tourist bus that has stopped in front of the Pearly Gates. They see two signs. One points to the left: ‘Heaven.’ The other points right: ‘Lectures about Heaven.’ The Germans all head to the right. And so does Stern. One entire chapter – 54 pages – does not even pretend to be about Germany but is about ...”

“... the chiefs of staff were unanimous – could only play into the hands of the Russians. If the gates of South Asia were to be barred securely against communism, the strategic interests not only of Britain, but also the West, required the bulwark of a united India.All this indicated that the Muslim League, once a tactical expedient for the Raj, was now the ...”

“... extremely popular. And if political correctness is seen as strongly bound to Labour, the Lib Dems, David Cameron, the EU, the BBC, the Guardian and, in Grimsby, Melanie Onn, the movement against it is strongly connected to Ukip, Jeremy Clarkson, the Daily Mail and, in Grimsby, Austin Mitchell.Before he stood aside, there was speculation Mitchell would be the ...”

“... a champion of privatisation, attributes the dropping of the ‘re-’ to a fellow Conservative, David Howell, one of the back-room Tory ideas men tinkering obscurely with economic models while Edward Heath and Harold Wilson squared off against the unions in the 1960s and 1970s. (Howell was Thatcher’s first energy minister. He is now Baron Howell of ...”

“... Model Army now gave them their opportunity. In the emergency of 1648, with Royalist forces at the gates of London, Maurice Thomson was securing the Thames and fetching vessels from Holland, his brother George – now army colonel and MP for Southwark – manning the perimeter of the South Bank; one of his partners was ensconced as private secretary to ...”

“... not about the art of curing people.’ A century after that – we are now in 1901 – Frederick Gates, the Baptist minister who was John D. Rockefeller’s chief adviser, was shocked to discover on reading the great William Osler’s medical textbook, how few diseases could be treated, much less cured. In the relatively few instances in which doctors were ...”

“... by psychiatric symptoms. Fanon’s most reliable biographers – Cherki and the British historian David Macey, whose book also appeared in 2000 – have tended to dismiss the dissertation, but Young and Khalfa make a strong case for its importance. In the very last line of Black Skin, White Masks, Fanon wrote: ‘O my body, make of me always a man who always ...”

“... tapering sides marked with corrugated rings, like a rocket engine scratched from the final cut of David Lynch’s Dune. The concert was at the top, and in order to get to it I passed through an exhibition of art created since the invasion, Ty Yak? How Are You? One of the curators, the artist Katya Libkind, had left a comment on the walls: ‘Basically it’s ...”

“... Grace Academy in Brixton. The programme was launched in 2000 by the then education secretary, David Blunkett, who explained that if sponsors put up £2 million, or 20 per cent of the capital costs, such ‘businesses, individuals, churches or voluntary bodies’ would get ‘considerable freedom over management structures and processes’, and of course a ...”

“... when workers in their CS Wind boiler suits, some green, some blue, some orange, stream from the gates on bicycles and scooters. Buses are laid on for those with far to go. The workers, about half of them migrants from the poor province of Nghe An in what used to be North Vietnam, have complex attitudes towards their jobs. By the standards of Phu My, CS Wind ...”