“... former Conservative donor Jeremy Hosking; and by far its biggest backer, the cryptocurrency tycoon Christopher Harborne, who is based in Thailand. Harborne’s money has helped Reform to become a political force, but it has also brought unwelcome scrutiny. In April the Guardian revealed that shortly before the 2024 general election he had given Farage £5 ...”

“... became known as MI5 and MI6 had to be kept so secret; MI5 remained officially secret for 80 years. Christopher Andrew has another explanation, however. It was just a ‘taboo’, he writes (quoting the historian Michael Howard), like ‘intra-marital sex’. Everyone knew it went on, and was ‘quite content that it should, but to speak, write or ask questions ...”

“... things were not going well at home. Glenconner by now had five children: Charles, Henry, Christopher and the twins May and Amy. Their father found it difficult to be ‘affectionate or tactile’ with them and Glenconner, still following the pattern set in her own family, felt it was more ‘urgent’ to be a wife than a mother. She sent the children ...”

“... it seeks to include within one set of covers everything that any serious reader of Waugh might hope to find ... everything notably funny, elegant, beautiful, profound or self-revealing, and everything that seems to define Waugh’s own aims.’ The ‘overproduction’ could in the nature of the case not be stopped, at this time of day, even by the least ...”

“... July. In the evening go across the road to the newly empty No 55 for a kind of book fair. Francis Hope died in the Paris air-crash in 1974; pressed for space, his widow Mary Hope is now, 22 years later, disposing of his books and has asked some of his friends round for a glass of wine and to take away whatever they might ...”

“... New England experiences of Whalley and Goffe are not unknown to historians; Christopher Pagliuco’s The Great Escape of Edward Whalley and William Goffe (2012) and Matthew Jenkinson’s Charles I’s Killers in America: The Lives and Afterlives of Edward Whalley and William Goffe (2019) both feature in Harris’s bibliography. But since ...”

“... The bird that I hope to catch in the net of this play is … the true quality of experience in a group of people, that cloudy, flickering, evanescent – fiercely charged! – interplay of live human beings in the thundercloud of a common crisis.’ Who among our contemporary playwrights would dare pen anything so shamelessly romantic? Who would even want to? Certainly not our Brenton-and-Hare political puritans, nor yet our Ayckbourn-and-Frayn tragicomedians ...”

“... a combination of propitious circumstances has brought forth two world-beating runners. Nobody can hope to account for this, but the luck is worth glorying in. It embraces even the principals’ names: Coe and Ovett – as snappy as trademarks, and eminently saleable on the vowel-happy continent of Europe where the pair’s records have mostly been set. One ...”

“... over notes I made in the 1980s during my investigation into the Birmingham pub bombings, in the hope that these will help them to track down one of the two surviving bombers. A bit late, you may think, given that the bombings took place nearly fifty years ago, and my investigation, which led to the release of six innocent men, was concluded in 1991. What ...”

“... architectural theory and made Dyer into a kind of rebel against the Enlightenment. He encounters Christopher Wren in the role of a devotee of Gresham’s College empiricism, and then takes part in a dialogue (appropriately, in a Restoration comedy mode) with John Vanbrugh, cast as inquisitive modern in contrast with Dyer’s suspicious loyalties to the ...”

“... was convicted again, following a retrial relying on Plummer’s supposed confession to a cellmate, Christopher Dunne, before his first trial. Dunne, who died in 1999, had schizophrenia and was a police informant. Plummer’s conviction was finally overturned when the Court of Appeal ruled that the cellmate’s claim shouldn’t have been put before the jury ...”

“... Christopher Harper-Mercer​ wrote that he had no life. He had no girlfriend and no job; the world was against him. He lived with his mother only a few miles from the Umpqua Community College campus in Roseburg, Oregon, and he collected guns. He shot nine people dead at the college on 1 October and injured nine others before killing himself ...”

“... concern, though constant interruption and his own shameful lack of preparation meant there was no hope of his doing it properly. Not a dream that needs long on the couch to crack, but Spender analysed one element with particular insight: he was currently struggling with a long memorial poem in which he hoped to sum up what he thought about Auden, ‘of which ...”

“... the physiological draw at its most capricious. Yet we pay attention to how others have died in the hope of something better or for assurance that, since others have managed, so will we. Last words and behaviour seem irresistibly exemplary and consequential, a testimony to the truth or falseness of what we believe or live by. Dying – and last moments in ...”

“... board under Perry Anderson. While their elders on the left – the generation of E.P. Thompson and Christopher Hill – had planted radical politics in the soil of English history, the new cohort had more cosmopolitan ambitions. They looked abroad, especially to the Continent and the likes of Lukács, Gramsci and Althusser, for remedies against what they saw ...”