“... she says. ‘I zigged when I should have zagged.’ 1 November, New York. I have been reading Philip Roth’s Exit Ghost, which I’ve enjoyed (insofar as I can enjoy a novel about an incontinent, impotent, irascible old writer who is two years younger than I am). One of the ghosts who is making his exit is, as I understand it, Nathan Zuckerman ...”

“... Paymasters held to ransom. ‘That was exactly the plan,’ Livingstone told his audience at St Martin-in-the-Fields. ‘It has gone absolutely perfectly.’ In boroughs affected by this 2012 game-show rabies – long-established businesses closed down, travellers expelled from edgeland settlements, allotment holders turned out – there were ...”

“... and their advisers exposed Royal Mail to the raptors of TNT and Deutsche Post, aka DHL. I asked Martin Stanley, the former civil servant Labour put in charge of exposing Royal Mail to competition from 2000 to 2004, why Britain did it before everyone else in Europe. ‘Unilateral disarmament,’ he said. ‘If we hadn’t disarmed first, it would have taken ...”

“... peoples, an idea that had once been promoted by ‘cultural Zionists’ such as Judah Magnes and Martin Buber, and long since been buried by the Zionist mainstream. Aware of this irony, Said once mischievously described himself as the ‘last Jewish intellectual’. The ‘empty nationalism’ that divided the land’s inhabitants into ‘camps of Jews and ...”

“... team, led by the late Sir Michael Havers; the juniors were Michael Hill, Paul Purnell and Philip Havers (Sir Michael’s son). The three juniors at a later point signed a note listing, among others, Conlon’s alibi witnesses. They included Burke’s name on the list. However, a separate list later made available to the defence unaccountably omitted ...”

“... But what can you say about your own life to someone on the brink of theirs? I didn’t cry when Philip died either. I’d seen him shrivel into a brown husk, the taut dry skin stretched over his skeleton like a mummified body excavated from some desert tomb. I’d seen him in his wheelchair with an oxygen mask clamped to his face, his eyes rotating ...”

“... protect the staff concerned. In The Golden Thread: Stitching Patient Safety into the NHS (2023), Philip Berry, another hepatology consultant, describes the usual approach of clinical investigators as ‘supportive’ of the medical staff, ‘forward-looking’, ‘soft’. All of this was true of the SI report into Martha’s death, though occasionally the ...”