“... he has done this before – and an end to net migration targets, much to the approval of the Adam Smith Institute. But he can say anything, every which way, between now and Halloween. His ghoulish cabinet was picked to scare Brussels and grab concessions at the last minute. But crucially it’s a back-to-the-future dream team, looking far beyond Brexit to the ...”

“... the son of the author of Wind in the Willows?A. A nickname: Mouse.Tell the Bede story to Maggie Smith, who recalls some lines she had to sing in revue:Oh, I am the Venerable BedeI can scarcely write and just about read.18 February. Listening to the last movement of Elgar’s First Symphony I’m put in mind of some huge submerged mass coming to the ...”

“... which had a good sound, as ‘the interspeglium’ and ‘the corigada’, which names, he told Margaret, ‘the children could not understand.’ If I go down to the bottom of the garden it seems as if some one had fallen into the brook. How would you go about dividing Emerson’s grief into components? There seems to be no bargaining and no anger in ...”

“... trustees would not countenance an agnostic headmaster. Mary Ward intervened. Her publisher, George Smith, enriched by Elsmere and its successors, was the proprietor of the Cornhill Magazine. Thanks to Mrs Ward’s influence, Leonard was taken on in 1901. He would eventually become editor.Released from her matron’s duties at Charterhouse, Julia took out a ...”

“... to undermine his health. Contaminated blood products, he said, had ‘ruined his life’.Colin Smith’s parents were told their son had HIV when he was two. It was 1984. The doctor ‘didn’t even take us into a room; he just told us in a corridor in front of other patients,’ Colin’s mother recalled. The family had ‘Aids dead’ scrawled on their ...”

“... Boyd also bore a ‘striking resemblance’ to an artist’s impression drawn up with the help of Margaret Hodgson, who saw a man and a skipping girl on Low Street shortly before 10 p.m. The police had found a photograph of Boyd taken in the early 1990s, sitting in an armchair, his left leg slung casually over his right. Wright showed the two images side by ...”

“... placed Ackroyd’s Blake at number three in their non-fiction bestseller list (behind Delia Smith and The Diaries of Cynthia Gladwyn.) They glossed the book, for the benefit of readers who had managed to bypass the promotional campaign, as: ‘The supreme Londoner.’ What isn’t clear is whether they were alluding to Blake or to Ackroyd. Because that ...”

“... Even if the author dies the books can go on, as witnessed by 1992’s Scarlett: The Sequel to Margaret Mitchell’s Gone with the Wind by Alexandra Ripley, the fastest-selling American novel of all time. In denying that the story ever ends, the epic denies also that ‘the real story’ – to put it bluntly, life – will come to an end, and for a ...”

“... became even worse in the course of the decade. In September 1978, just a few months after Margaret Thatcher claimed to understand why English men and women might feel their country was being ‘swamped’ by Commonwealth immigrants, the National Front moved its central offices from Teddington in West London to Great Eastern Street, a few ...”

“... surviving colliery in the 1984-85 strike, who was so committed to the miners’ struggle against Margaret Thatcher that he led a band of pickets out to sea in a small boat to try to stop an oil tanker, became Blyth Valley’s MP in 1987. He won the seat seven times after that, hewing to his communitarian principles, his belief in socialism and a hostility to ...”

“... Colm Tóibín’s today is all books, though said to look over rooftops, which could be nice; Margaret Drabble’s faced the street, but with curtains so long and John Lewis-like I’d be frightened they’d get into the prose; Edna O’Brien’s had some relics of Samuel Beckett, hardly likely to unchain the imagination or get the words flowing. All have ...”

“... inflation rocketed. HBO went for high-selling literary novelists, signing up Jeffrey Eugenides, Margaret Atwood and Jonathan Safran Foer. ‘HBO gained a reputation for going through pilots like Kleenex,’ Biskind writes.He estimates Amazon will have scant change from a billion dollars for its Rings of Power series, based on Tolkien’s lesser-known ...”

“... or a question of interpretation, or a misleading claim, but a lie. It ignores the rebate Margaret Thatcher negotiated. When you factor that in, the EU actually ‘takes’ about £250 million a week from Britain. Deepening the dishonesty of the original lie, even that figure overstates Britain’s contribution by more than half, because the EU gives ...”

“... taken in January 1997 at his 50th birthday celebrations, with Billy Corgan, Lou Reed and Robert Smith. This was the period when he finally found inner calm and displayed outer happiness, relaxed into himself. But take a look at this photo: doesn’t he look a bit wizened, a bit unreal, like a doll of himself or a plastic action figure of a late-era rock ...”

“... affecting the climate or impoverishing us. But as a result of actions taken a generation ago by Margaret Thatcher’s Conservatives – a party whose nationalist programme promised independence from Europe – the decisions aren’t Britain’s alone. Thatcher promised less state involvement in industry but the future of Britain’s energy supply now hinges ...”