“... machines play ‘Ob-La-Di, Ob-La-Da’ and mobile phones ring with a digitised version of ‘Penny Lane’. Another family affair, on a much larger scale. ‘Very strange.’ Not so strange, perhaps, is Lennon’s wish, from the late 1960s, to have done with this ever-extending artificial family. Neither is the fact that he failed to do so. On the face of ...”

“... for the fourth time in its brief history, to prevent the resignation of the first minister, David Trimble. Just over a year later, on 26 November 2003, the much postponed Assembly election took place, with the DUP and Sinn Féin emerging as the largest parties, gaining ground from moderate unionists and nationalists. A review of the working of the Good ...”

“... pausing before they go up again, like they’re going towards God,’ says a musician quoted in David Leaf’s liner notes to The Pet Sounds Sessions (1997).From ‘In My Room’ (1963) to songs like ‘’Til I Die’ (1971) and ‘Sail on, Sailor’ (1973), the Beach Boys made music that for some of us has become a kind of gospel. This may seem a large ...”

“... through the Blackwall Tunnel (where a single misdirected lorry, trying to pick up time in the fast lane, can get trapped by prophylactic stalactites, and bring London to a standstill). I’d been to the Millennium Experience site in the early days, before the tent was erected, and I was intrigued, a year on, when the LRB offered me the chance of a second ...”

“... amounts to an individualised newspaper. I would be entirely happy to pay to subscribe to Anthony Lane on movies in the New Yorker, and Patricia Wells on restaurants in the Herald Tribune, and Larry Elliott on economics in the Guardian, and David Pogue on technology in the New York Times, and I also want to feel free to ...”

“... of residence or identity and I’m sent home to get them.14 May. A piece in the Independent about David Blunkett tackling falling standards in education. I am pictured, though whether as evidence of decline or hope for the future I can’t make out. Either would please me.Judging from newspaper reports, the congregation at Ted Hughes’s memorial service in ...”

“... wealth and such emblems of modernity as air-conditioned shopping malls, designer boutiques and six-lane highways flashing with supercharged vehicles exclusively driven by men. Trump returned from his visit with a promise – he claimed – of $350 billion in Saudi spending on American armaments over the next ten years, with $110 billion right away, of benefit ...”

“... Tudor house in Santa Monica, on a slip street off an arroyo that dipped down to the four-lane Pacific Coast Highway. Before the war, the house had belonged to the Austro-Hungarian screenwriter Salka Viertel, confidante of Greta Garbo, for whom she wrote five movies. Viertel was then the highest paid screenwriter at MGM and her home was a magnet for ...”

“... with Lear and the Fool, while the earlier image of ‘dithering’ thistles that ‘crowd the lane’ alludes to the violent disturbances of the early 1830s, when Clare wrote this poem. Just before the lines quoted, he writes of ‘dunghills hiding snake & toad’, meaning the rich farmers, placemen and recipients of clerical tithes. That final hard ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... to Buy has dramatically affected the numbers of council tenants on estates. On the Golden Lane estate, for instance, they account for a mere 50 per cent.) When asked what the best thing about their flats and houses is, most residents say they love the air, the openness, the freshness, and the sense of living in something historic and idealistic. The ...”

“... a young man were to be heightened by the ‘drive against male vice’ initiated in 1954 under David Maxwell Fyfe as home secretary, whose most notable victim was Lord Montagu, imprisoned for 12 months for homosexual offences. On the Tube, Forster closely observes an ‘enormous young foreigner’. Was he perhaps ‘a Cossack dancer? I would have asked ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... by a social worker from the local authority Mental Health Team. Clunis told the social worker, David Purse, that he was on medication because of drug abuse, had no psychiatric problems and wanted help only with housing. He was taken at his word: Purse told the Inquiry that he ‘could only go on the information he was given’, and that he thought Clunis ...”

“... only TNT,’ Leijten said. ‘The postal system is sick.’ On the eve of my journey to Holland, David Simpson, the earnest Ulsterman who is Royal Mail’s chief spokesman, took me to one of the facilities the company is most proud of, the Gatwick mail centre in Sussex. Despite its name, it has nothing to do with the nearby airport. It’s a giant mail ...”