“... 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 ...”

“... of thoughts I not long afterwards wanted to upend, or undermine. In that way, though by different means, prolonged exposure to Stach’s work does have an effect-overlap with prolonged exposure to the work of Kafka. It has been said of Kafka’s work many times that the thing to remember is that it is funny. Kafka was known to laugh uncontrollably when ...”

“... refuser (1853). Perhaps the two portrayals are not coincidental. In 1851, the Melville family read David Copperfield aloud as their evening entertainment. The pre-20th-century office worker saw himself as a cut above the unsalaried labouring masses, and was as ambivalent about his superiors, who were his only means of ...”

“... agreed, among them Saleh Muslim, the leader of the PYD, the YPG’s political arm. In Britain David Richards, the former chief of the defence staff, called on Cameron to accept that Assad’s army was best placed to take the fight to IS. ‘At the moment we’ve got contradictory war aims,’ he told the BBC. ‘We want to deal with Isis but we also want ...”

“... and rhetoric – has labelled his Egyptian counterpart ‘a fantastic guy’. In late 2015, David Cameron rolled out the red carpet for Sisi at Downing Street; Theresa May has promised ‘a new chapter in bilateral relations’ between the UK and Egypt. The IMF, meanwhile, is back to peddling unrealities of its own. The 2011 revolution erupted in part ...”

“... memories of 6 January were at any risk of fading, they were rekindled on 28 October, when David DePape attacked Paul Pelosi, husband of the Speaker of the House, Nancy Pelosi, with a hammer after breaking into their home in San Francisco (she subsequently announced she was standing down as Speaker). DePape shook Pelosi awake with cries of ‘Where’s ...”

“... within the various [agencies]. This use of duplicate external service providers was often a means by which corruption was allowed to flourish.’ McKinsey South Africa also partnered with two Gupta front companies, Regiments Capital and Trillian Capital Partners, to secure contracts with Transnet and Eskom. In each case, Zupta functionaries in the ...”

“... is no record of such a letter from Maberley in the Post Office archives.’ This means that either Maberley (who on the evidence of the record was well-disposed to the young clerk) sent an unofficial poison-pen letter, or that there was no official ‘character’ of the damning kind Trollope describes. There would of course be no problem if ...”

“... best be understood if one sees the Afrikaners as deliberately using the political instruments as a means of pulling themselves up from the socially and economically-handicapped status of a proletarian nation. Until 1948, the average income of urbanEnglish-speaking whites was well over twice that of Afrikaners. Before the Second World War Afrikaners supplied 20 ...”

“... of the diverse Victorian literature of sex, making worthwhile generalisations more feasible. It means that the diversity may overlie a relatively homogeneous sexual culture: in the sense that writers are likely to be more alert to other possibilities of belief and action in their community than they acknowledge (something of this sort is often all that ...”

“... This is not just a matter of red roses: the Party will need to rethink what (if anything) it means by socialism, and reach a more balanced view about how central it has been within its traditions. This may well entail re-assessing Gaitskell’s attack on Clause 4 after the Party’s defeat in 1959. Morgan dismisses this initiative as ‘a victory for ...”

“... brother John became the estate surveyor. Brown’s father died when Lancelot was only four, but means had been found to keep him at school until he was 16, possibly with the help of the Loraines, after which he went as an apprentice to the head gardener at Kirkharle. It is one of the ironies of Brown’s peculiar reputation that in his lifetime and since he ...”

“... one sees, in addition to his old friends Tolkien and Stanley Bennett, such leading Christians as David Knowles, Benedictine monk and ecclesiastical historian, and Basil Willey, lifelong Methodist and member of the literary panel for the translation of the New English Bible. (The electors’ second choice, to whom they offered the chair during Lewis’s ...”

“... were preventing the private sector taking on public land to build badly needed new homes. In 2010 David Cameron commissioned Philip Green to conduct an ‘efficiency review’ for the new coalition government, and he duly reported that the state, ‘the largest tenant/owner in the country’, was ‘wholly inefficient’ when it came to the use and management ...”

“... in need of constant protection. Menacing ‘jungles’ have become the exotic ‘rainforests’ of David Attenborough documentaries, shrinking islands of environmental purity. The adjective ‘wild’, once applied to the savage creatures and barbarous landscapes of postlapsarian nature, has been reduced to a mark of culinary approbation. In Ruth Pavey’s ...”