“... Women’s rights campaigners occupy council-owned buildings rather than padlock themselves to the gates of Downing Street. Strangest of all, in September 2015 David Cameron wrote to the Conservative leader of Oxfordshire County Council to complain about cuts it had recently announced: I was disappointed at the long list of ...”

“... his 35 years at Netherne. This led me, some months later, to an office in Lambeth belonging to David O’Flynn, a consultant psychiatrist at the Lambeth and Maudsley Hospitals, and chair of the Adamson Collection Trust. We walked up and down the corridors of the clinic where he worked and looked at the display of patients’ pictures on the walls (these ...”

“... drawn into the newly vacant centre of the image: anything from the fluted pillars and wrought-iron gates of some nearby Classical architecture to the futuristic technology of the working environment. Keen to escape the predictable routines of business appearance, these photographs certainly don’t withdraw into a romantic focus on personal character. It is no ...”

“... or ‘patience’. The outbreak of the second intifada, in response to failed peace talks at Camp David in 2000 and Ariel Sharon’s provocative visit to Temple Mount, wrong-footed Hamas. The leadership reacted by ramping up suicide bombings, but it was being led by events rather than leading them. The movement had been founded on a rejection of partition and ...”

“... that the earth may know herself. E.K.: Now I see beyond like a furnace-mouth, as big as 4 or 5 gates of a city. It seemeth to be a quarter of a mile off. Out of the furnace-mouth seemeth a marvellous smoke or smother to come. Bye it seemeth to be a great lake of pitch, and it playeth or simpereth as water doth when it beginneth to seethe. Often the visions ...”

“... and the Sense of Place, his seminal study of the poems, and imposed a more linear sense. Fences, gates and ‘no trespassing’ signs went up. Trees were felled and streams diverted so that ditches could follow a straight line. Inclosure like a Buonaparte let not a thing remain, It levelled every bush and tree, and levelled every hill And hung the moles for ...”

“... 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 ...”