“... including Dusty Springfield and Franco Zeffirelli and later Gianni Versace and Princess Diana. Simon and Garfunkel were both bad at charades, he writes, though not as lousy as Bob Dylan, who couldn’t even do ‘sounds like’ or ‘how many syllables’: he was so inept that Elton threw oranges at him. Years later, Elton writes, ‘I was ...”

“... hacking at the News of the World collapsed. On 20 June, a few months after Coulson resigned as David Cameron’s director of communications, News International handed detectives emails between Coulson and the News of the World’s royal editor, Clive Goodman, proposing paying the police officers who guarded the queen. Quietly, Scotland Yard joined ...”

“... conglomerates have had to let it go. The Oxford University Press feel no obligation to keep David Gascoyne’s Collected Poems in print. Faber and Faber get along very nicely on Tom Eliot’s singing and dancing pussy-cats. The Cambridge Festival (don’t tell them) is nowhere, it isn’t happening. What’s the story? Even the participants don’t ...”

“... Strategy, a firm co-founded by Vote Leave’s head of communications and a former speechwriter for David Cameron, whose clients include Citibank, Spotify and Deliveroo. In all, according to analysis by the New Statesman, more than four times as many lobbyists as teachers ran for Parliament in July.The closer Labour got to power, the closer the business lobby ...”

“... died of before. Men dying in the time it takes to catch and throw off a cold: ‘One Thursday,’ David France writes in How to Survive a Plague, ‘sexy Tommy McCarthy from the classifieds department stayed out late at an Yma Sumac concert. Friday he had a fever. Sunday he was hospitalised. Wednesday he was dead.’ Later, there were tests. A virus ...”

“... almost Stalinist as no one wants to be the first to stop clapping. Coming out I find myself behind Simon Williams, who has been mentioned by his son as one of Ben’s closest friends and am cheered by the possibility that if Ben could play Ambrose, so could Simon – which happily he does. But ‘lovely Ben’ the ...”

“... public could watch serious debate between historical experts. Now they listen to the platitudes of Simon Schama or watch David Starkey astride the gun barrel of a tank pontificating about Henry VIII. Blair Worden, leading revisionist and elder statesman of 17th-century political history, is on record as worrying that ...”

“... that idea, which has a certain glamour because of Lanier’s close connection with the astrologer Simon Forman, a man who kept a journal record of his sexual conquests. He also saw Macbeth, The Winter’s Tale and Cymbeline at the Globe, and brought off a final trick, not all that wonderful if you think about it, by correctly predicting the date of his own ...”

“... to deliver much more than formulaic world-weariness, a drone like a miraculously articulate David Hockney impersonator. Jonathan Meades does this schtick so much better, performs himself with lip-smacking relish. Gossip has its charms, but not when it’s dragged out over three interminable evenings with animated postcard footage re-used to the point of ...”

“... Bildungsroman, the life and impressions of one young man: he even gets born with a caul on him, as David Copperfield did. Serge, however, attracts no sympathy or empathy or whatever from his creator: he’s a convergence, or rather an area of concentration, where ideas, images, words, preoccupations gather and regroup. The book is split into four main ...”

“... fans will recognise the old cast of characters, those almost-forgotten names – Charles Colson, David Young, Egil ‘Bud’ Krogh – and there is pleasure in this: a bit like watching an old horror film on late-night TV. Yet on that level Mr Hersh is not exciting. We know the Watergate story from every angle and, by now, from the memoirs of almost every ...”

“... way of talking about aliveness has changed. In the late 1970s, with the electronic toys Merlin, Simon and Speak and Spell, children began to classify computational objects as alive if they could think on their own. Faced with a computer toy that could play noughts and crosses, what counted to a child was not the object’s physical but its psychological ...”

“... radio station is gonna play this crap?’).The album ended up in the hands of a young David Toop. Unspooling its peculiarly effective mixture of sideshow fraudulence, oneiric hokum and deeply coded, deadly serious New Orleans folklore on a mono Dansette in a friend’s bedroom – a device that was hardly up to deciphering ‘the eccentricities of ...”

“... apocalyptic Westernists long to turn things around, to make their shattered world whole again. David Goodhart, the founding editor of Prospect, told the New York Times just before the general election that he believed Theresa May could dominate British politics for a generation. Mark Lilla, a professor at Columbia and a regular contributor to the New York ...”

“... Swann Committee of Inquiry into the education of ethnic minority groups is attacked by Simon Pearce for reflecting ‘the anti-racist doctrine that disparate levels of educational achievement between ethnic groups are proof positive of discrimination,’ and for being ‘basically illiberal’; its ‘moral base’, he says, ‘throbs with all the ...”