“... you, oh, it’s absolutely appalling, it can’t possibly work.’ Tom Sloan, the BBC’s Head of Light Entertainment at the time, was a cautious man who pondered, on reading the first script, ‘Were we making mock of Britain’s Finest Hour?’ His conversion was rapid. He was persuaded that everything was true; not only was pepper issued as a weapon, but ...”

“... hard evidence has led at least one academic researcher, Hal Brands, to conclude that ‘the green light thesis has more basis in myth than in reality.’ Chas Freeman, a distinguished US diplomat, recently provided me with a clue as to what might really have happened. In January 1981, as the Carter administration was preparing to leave office, Freeman, who ...”

“... peril. Certainly, Labour’s Scottish frontbenchers – Robin Cook (especially), Gordon Brown, Donald Dewar and, of course, John Smith himself – have a terse, combative Parliamentary style light-years from Mr Kinnock’s and this has earned them a grudging but general respect. Mr Smith was also thought (and plainly ...”

“... a procedure which seemed to be serving him well (The Sound and the Fury, As I lay dying, Light in August were all written like this), until it started to serve him less well, and the long history of collapses, black-outs and hospitalisations began. His first hospitalisation was in 1936, and there were to be very many more before his death in 1962; he ...”

“... is in, though not Sir Alan Cobham, whose private air force introduced millions to flying, or Sir Donald Wolfit. Tom Webster, the sports cartoonist, gains his niche, but not ‘Beachcomber’. Enough of that; the game is too easy to play. The entries are skilfully ‘potted’, judicious in the DNB manner, but the more one browses the more it is apparent that ...”

“... venereal disease as a young man, and proceed to examine his illnesses and hypochondria in the light of medical thinking at the time. They then consider metaphors of disease and healing – particularly sexual disease and sexual healing – in Shelley’s poetry. Finally, a verdict of non-proven is returned: Shelley may have had syphilis, but as this ...”

“... that anyone else – certainly not such virulent homophobes as Senator Jesse Helms or Reverend Donald Wildmon, who couldn’t consciously allow themselves to see Mapplethorpe’s images as anything other than outrageous pornography – reacted to the photographs in the way Mapplethorpe hoped they would, at least not back in the late 1970s through to the ...”

“... internationalism. As the US administration tried to browbeat a reluctant UN into giving the green light for the invasion of Iraq, President Bush warned the General Assembly that it ‘faced a difficult and defining moment’. The alternatives were to back the war or become as ‘irrelevant’ as the League of Nations. A week later, a gung-ho ...”

“... had yet more vast machineries at their disposal. It’s no surprise, as Plotnick points out, that Donald Trump should so obviously relish the role of digital commander. In January this year, playing dicks on the table with Kim Jong-un, Trump at one point tweeted that he, too, had a nuclear button, ‘but it is a much bigger & more powerful one than his, and ...”

“... Kant to languish in the dusty rear.Wilson takes us back to Iris’s undergraduate tutorials with Donald MacKinnon. There was a lot of Kant on the table. What sort of Kant I wish I knew. These tutorials, or some of them, were shared with someone who has become a distinguished philosopher, and I would go straight to her at this moment were it not that we have ...”

“... secret of immortality did exist – and perhaps we could share in his godlike status. The blurb to Donald Douglas Duncan’s book of photographs – a selection from his previous books brought out, like Penrose’s slightly similar Portrait of Picasso, to coincide with the centenary – catches the tone exactly: ‘Through these extraordinary ...”

“... McCloskey. Here is the rise of a mass market, a revolution in retailing, and the transformation of light industry, with results which have lingered until our own day. For the last decades of the 19th century saw the appearance of such old faithfuls as fish and chips, New Zealand lamb, breakfast cereals and whisky; of ...”

“... differing in this respect from the prominent British child analysts Anna Freud, Melanie Klein, Donald Winnicott and John Bowlby. Questions were asked about the significance of the father in child development, and family therapy opened up the family as a system rather than a cult of personality. At the same time we were encouraged to believe that everything ...”

“... read ‘Extra Added Attraction’, and for Sinatra this particular gig was a pretty big deal. As Donald Clarke puts it in All or Nothing at All: A Life of Frank Sinatra (1997), the Paramount Theatre was ‘one of the shrines of the Swing era’. And so, on 30 December 1942, Sinatra was brought onstage, in an almost desultory way, by Benny Goodman. ‘And ...”

“... as sinners, although it is left dark how they offend if Aquinas did not. Stout sheds a little light on this question in elucidating what it is for a moral proposition to be true: ‘I have no trouble,’ he writes, ‘with the idea of a culture-transcendent Moral Law if it commits us merely to such notions as ... that there are moral truths ... The ...”