“... Whitfield, and the social significance and songwriting talent of John Lennon rather than James Brown – persists. Clearly, too, most rock writing foregrounds lyrics, whereas most dance music works through texture, beats and effects. Back in 1976, punk set itself against disco wholeheartedly. Alan Jones and Jussi Kantonen describe an occasion in July 1979 ...”

“... UK expelled a few of each other’s diplomats. Their secret services stopped co-operating. Gordon Brown refused all meetings with Putin. In London, Litvinenko’s widow, Marina, was told by the Foreign Office to sit tight and wait while the UK tried to find a way to extradite the killers through back-channel negotiations. In 2010 she was still waiting. When ...”

“... of the Codex Leicester, the furthest-flung of all Leonardo’s notebooks, bought ten years ago by Bill Gates for a reported $30 million. There have been some pages lost here and there – a light-fingered bibliophile, Count Guglielmo Libri, stole several in the mid 19th century – but these notebooks are essentially as Leonardo left them. Some still have ...”

“... by Clarence Thomas, Neil Gorsuch and Brett Kavanaugh, and dissents by Sonia Sotomayor and Ketanji Brown Jackson.* Roberts held that the admissions programmes at Harvard and UNC ran afoul of the equal protection clause of the Fourteenth Amendment to the US Constitution, which requires states to provide to all persons the ‘equal protection of the laws’. He ...”

“... a child isn’t merely one consumer choice among many. More than twenty years ago, in Maybe One, Bill McKibben preached a neo-Malthusian sermon to his fellow affluent Americans about limiting damage to the planet by making the only child ‘a cultural norm’. McKibben and his wife have one child, and, he writes, ‘what eventually made up our minds was ...”

“... as the intolerable Arthur Calvert in Late Call. There are traces of him all over the place. Even Bill Eliot, that successful barrister and adoring husband in The Middle Age of Mrs Eliot, has a touch of him in his gambling and the financial irresponsibility that leaves his widow almost destitute. Sir Angus tells us that he felt closer to his father than to ...”

“... the pay rise of nurses ‘need a sharp blast with an enema tube’. ‘FAT CAT gas boss Cedric Brown’ and other ‘overpaid bosses’ of privatised utilities have also come under fire: ‘If the pigs put their noses much deeper in the trough, they’ll suffocate.’ Disdain for the royal ne plus ultra of Britain’s class hierarchy has long been ...”

“... Both of the first movies (shot by Gordon Willis) look wonderful: interiors full of gold and brown, shady characters caught in the half-light, murmuring in corridors; glittering exteriors, all sunlight and celebration, songs, christenings, weddings, crowds. The dialogue would be portentous and dull if it were not all delivered with such persuasive ...”

“... Rusk, who would become secretary of state during the Vietnam War. In Holbrooke’s last year at Brown University, before becoming a foreign service officer in Rusk’s department, he compared Rusk to Woodrow Wilson in a term paper. Wilson ‘had a beautiful dream’ of global freedom and peace on the American model, Holbrooke wrote, and ‘it shone in the ...”

“... the state liable to pay damages for serious abuses of power. The leading British commentary, Brown and Bell, holds that ‘the surprising feature’ of French administrative law, given its Napoleonic origin, is the fact that ‘it has survived to provide one of the most systematic guarantees of the liberties of the individual against the state anywhere ...”

“... know from the hyperlibertarian language of the tech world’s kings. Even the mildest of them, Bill Gates, said in 1998: ‘There isn’t an industry in America that is more creative, more alive and more competitive. And the amazing thing is that all this happened without any government involvement.’ The current lords talk of various kinds of ...”

“... a Soviet-era building the size of five football pitches. Meetings involved walking down miles of brown corridors, to a smoke-filled boardroom where a producer would quite comfortably say: ‘We need something to keep the nation pacified. The financial crisis has the Kremlin worried. Ideas?’ The other group was made up of the entertainment ...”

“... he somehow beams off the car radio, we’d have a crackerjack listening experience along the way. Bill Barich writes in his new book, Long Way Home: On the Trail of Steinbeck’s America, that ‘at the core of Travels is a bleak vision of America’s decline that he chose to mitigate by telling jokes and anecdotes.’* Barich, who thinks less of the book ...”

“... then or now). Dickens, Tennyson and Carlyle were among the signatories of a letter in support of a Bill for the Suppression of Street Noises. Dickens complained to Parliament on behalf of all whining, stay-at-home writers about ‘the frightful noises in despite of which your correspondents have to gain their bread’, and doubtless also gained as little ...”

“... very well. We move deeper into the building, along wood-panelled corridors punctuated by heavy, brown-lacquered doors. The place is clean-smelling but gloomy in the extreme, and very silent. Climbing the stairs to a half-landing, we knock at a much smaller door. Beyond it is a tiny, bare room. Inside are Rita and Crystal, the mother and daughter Fernando ...”