“... The older workers wanted to take redundancy. The stagers didn’t. As Albertina says, they were a young department. They didn’t want to spend the next thirty years on the dole. Management claimed they were pitching for new business, but many suspected the yard was earmarked for closure.A strike was called on 28 June. When management threatened to tug the ...”

“... by the FBI, it deepened the impression of an espionage implosion in the vicinity of Trump. Michael Flynn, Trump’s first national security adviser, pleaded guilty to the charge of lying to the FBI about his discussion of sanctions with the Russian ambassador. His sentence was postponed by a DC district court in December (with a strong indication that ...”

“... morning​ on waking I saw her: not the frowning woman in the only surviving photograph but a young girl in a laboratory in a high-waisted dress. Atkins’s mother, Hester, had not survived the effects of childbirth, dying ‘twenty weary months later’. John Children had also lost his own mother as a baby, and Atkins was raised by her father and ...”

“... Tory journalists who campaigned against the Good Friday Agreement, including his cabinet colleague Michael Gove.Northern Irish politics are more turbulent than at any time since the Good Friday Agreement was signed. Sinn Féin and the Democratic Unionist Party came close to an agreement for the restoration of power-sharing at the start of 2018, but the DUP ...”

“... especially in America, where Israeli propaganda seems to lead a life of its own. Whereas, in 1975, Michael Adams and Christopher Mayhew were able to write about a coherent but unstated policy of unofficial British press censorship, according to which unpleasant truths about Zionism were systematically suppressed, the situation is not nearly as obvious so far ...”

“... I was raised by a river. ‘Thick’ is a good word for the way water seemed to me when I was young and still seems now: sustaining, brown, benign – or white, decisive, invigorating, rushing over a weir, churning from the back of a boat. Having been adopted, I was spared the binding notion of blood, with all its passion and fatalism. I simply took the ...”

“... Four years later, during rehearsals for a revival of the first production, one of von Bülow’s young assistants had a mental breakdown, apparently brought on by the opera, and was institutionalised. In 1911, Felix Mottl collapsed and died while conducting Tristan and Joseph Keilberth met the same end in 1968.We enjoy the stories about Tristan und Isolde ...”

“... frame-narrative of Citizen Kane, which mentions ‘a dying daily’, the newspaper that the young Kane revives, Conrad, snatching the phrase from midair, reflects: ‘We die daily; each day, living journalistically, we edge closer to death.’ The critical procedure here seems oddly recondite until you recall a passage from one of Welles’s ...”

“... of unplanned pregnancies – Arthur Seaton, for instance, in Saturday Night and Sunday Morning or Michael Caine’s Alfie – while the women suffer, from their men as much as their abortions. The moral question faced by these men, who until now have been indiscriminately handing round their penises, is whether they will take responsibility for the sex that ...”

“... detox and drug rehabilitation projects. The London Connection, in Westminster, tries to attract young people between 16 and 26; it has television, a pool table, provides free razors and lunch at 15 pence. The Kaleidoscope Project, in Kingston upon Thames, aims to serve heroin-users in need of treatment. They house a medical team who run a methadone ...”

“... loved the Ritz,’ her private secretary recalled. ‘She was looked after by beautifully dressed young men: the world wasn’t bothering her anymore.’ Thatcher spent the next three months in a suite that cost £3660 a night. She died in her bed on 8 April 2013 after suffering a massive stroke. According to her biographer Charles Moore, the bill for her ...”

“... miners during their year-long strike and organising socialist festivals in the town (attended by a young Starmer in 1987 and 1988). But his power had ebbed.As Benn’s stock fell, Ken Livingstone’s was rising. He took control of the Greater London Council (GLC) in 1981 after a thrilling bit of political manoeuvring, with the ambition of using his tenure at ...”

“... in London stepped back from finance and became involved in a charity that helps disadvantaged young people. On her way to a meeting of the organisation in a northern English town the taxi driver began telling her about its economic woes and she realised the multinational responsible for hurting the people she was trying to help was one of the companies ...”

“... Jeremy Harding reads extracts from his essay about migration. The full article is below. A young, personable man who speaks fair English, Hamraz had been in Dunkirk for about a month when we met. He was a member of the Afghan National Army, from the district of Azra, south-east of Kabul. Early in 2011, going home on leave, he was called to account by ...”

“... was a technocrat, the nearest thing there has ever been in British politics to the bright young men the Grands Ecoles turn out to administer the French state corporations. As Wilson’s Minister of Technology between 1966 and 1970, he had stood for a Britain that could be at home in the modern world. Whenever, during his time in office, British Rail ...”