“... his medical records were hacked, police officers were bribed for access to the details they held on him. The Sun in particular, under the editorship of Rebekah Brooks, made repeated intrusions into his private life in order to get him on the back foot. Brown calls it ‘a direct attempt to distort and suborn the policy of the government’. He accepts ...”

“... to Solomon, ‘for he had heard, that they had anointed him king in the room of his father,’ David: For Hiram was ever a lover of David. And Solomon sent to Hiram, saying: thou knowest how that David my father could not build an house unto the name of the Lord his God, for the wars ...”

“... painting published in 1992 revealed that although traces of the Cupid survived, he can never have held a bird. This should have been obvious all along: the picture has been in Dresden since 1699, and had the bird been visible while the Cupid was intact, someone in the 18th century would surely have identified the Venus as the one by Giorgione described by ...”

“... made a ‘five-figure contribution’; the rest was covered by the then owners of the hotel, David and Frederick Barclay, identical twins who appeared on the Sunday Times Rich List later that month with a combined fortune of £2.3 billion.This wasn’t the first time the Barclays had helped to house Thatcher. After leaving Number Ten she had moved into ...”

“... A rhetorical distance establishes and holds the distance between cultures; the writer himself is held by that distance. A year later Kipling investigated the milk supply of Lahore, thought to be a source of typhoid. He took his purposes and standards with him. His report imitated the narratives of the English sanitary reformers who had written about the ...”

“... much zest into a feeble allegory. In his excellent critical biography of Tati, published in 1999, David Bellos points out that less than three years before he began shooting the film (in May 1947) the Gestapo still had an office on the main square of Sainte-Sévère. And now American movies and military policemen are the problem?Many of the best scenes in ...”

“... Dickensian asylum, or a ‘snake pit’. For that period, it was a decent place. Still, Elsie was held against her will and without anyone asking whether she should have been there.Archie was quite good at school but had no taste for it, and no need once his mother was gone. He preferred picture shows and music hall at the Bristol Hippodrome. So he went ...”

“... electorate from succumbing to the over-optimistic prospectus presented by the SNP. Surely, David Cameron reckoned, the same formula would work again a mere two years later in the UK-wide Brexit referendum. After all, there was also the reassuring story of the UK’s first Euro-referendum in 1975. Then, the prime minister, Harold Wilson, had gone ...”

“... Adjustment, no matter how comfortable it appears to be, is never freedom.’ David Reisman said that in The Lonely Crowd, a work of academic/pop sociology, published in the US in the late Forties; much read and remarked on at the time, and now forgotten. I looked it up the other day when I was due to say something at the South Bank Centre in connection with the Cities on the Move exhibition at the Hayward ...”

“... to me was worried that he wouldn’t be able to get an interview with any of the guys from GQ. David Gandy, the male supermodel, wearing a shark-tooth suit and a Burberry tie, was being interviewed for Fashion TV. Within seconds of him standing up people were photographing him being filmed. You see this all the time at fashion events. Legend says there was ...”

“... we know what happens when politics falls apart, including Europe in the 1930s, which is often held up as a warning for what might be around the corner. Contemporary America is far more prosperous than other states where democracy has failed in the past, however unequally that prosperity is distributed. Its population is much older. Civil disorder tends to ...”

“... One of these fragile mirrors, that ever doted on thine image, is about to be broken.’ Godwin held back the publication of Matilda, thinking its mixture of fact and fiction likely to be mischievous, but Shelley in the next year borrowed an idealised version of the same plot for ‘Epipsychidion’, the poem Mary Shelley would describe as his ‘Italian ...”

“... This is the Big Bang theory of the origin of the universe, and although its general principles are held true by all but a few mavericks, the notion of a truly point-like moment of creation – a singularity, in the lingo – has seemed unattractive to quite a few physicists, and there have been numerous attempts to construct cosmological models which conform ...”

“... meals. Only at the actual burial did the successor reveal himself, and even then, he was not held to possess his full powers until crowned and anointed with holy oil at Reims Cathedral. In the 17th century, however, the Bourbon monarch abandoned these quasi-magical rites. Instead, they retreated into their royal palaces, where they developed the ...”

“... for the CIA both in Latin America and in Africa. Luis Posada is an explosives expert who formerly held a commission in the US Army. Like Rodriguez, he participated in many anti-Castro operations in the Sixties. In the early Seventies, he served as a counter-insurgency adviser to the Venezuelan Army, and, later, as chief of operations of the Venezuelan ...”