“... atolls had contributed to a widespread scepticism about the bomb. In 1984, the new prime minister, David Lange, announced that he would make the country a nuclear-free zone – a policy hated by the US but popular, then as now, in New Zealand. When New Zealand began to refuse permission for nuclear-powered ships to enter its ports, the US suspended New Zealand ...”

“... with photographs of the ‘passionate attitudes’ that Charcot had elicited from his young female patients. The debt to Freud ran deeper still: without free association there was no automatic writing, which Breton explored with Philippe Soupault as early as 1920 in Les Champs magnétiques, and both the interpretation of dreams and the analysis of ...”

“... masculine sceptic while Mulder is the feminine believer. (What a man! I would exclaim as I watched David Duchovny in his little swimsuit. What a man!) It is not in the riverine quality of her voice, banked by reeds, sometimes pierced low by waterbirds. It is not even in her partner’s reaction, his one liquid larger pupil, the soft hopeless hope that he turns ...”

“... daydreams of its future as a world guru. In his later avatars as a Tory MP, a science minister in David Cameron’s cabinet, Baron Johnson of Marylebone, a fellow at Harvard’s Kennedy School and a dabbler in Adani’s honeypot, Johnson turned instead to describing how the ‘new India’ was ‘helping shape this ...”

“... festivals. Surprisingly perhaps, there were more Americans than Belgians, and the majority were young, born between 1800 and 1810. Whether this reflects the overall composition of the visitors, or merely of those who thought it would be fun to sign the visitors’ book, is unknowable. The big fish Brewer catches is Charles Babbage, who came in ...”

“... as the major channel into this country for the theories of the European Enlightenment – or so David Watkin’s generous reading of Soane’s muddled (and, at the time, scarcely audible) Royal Academy lectures would suggest. These rival claims to Soane’s legacy are neatly captured, and subverted, in a cartoon currently on show in Sir John Soane’s ...”

“... crowds increasingly ‘decomposed into solitary consumers’. The rise of ‘superstar DJs’ like David Guetta and Fatboy Slim displaced the ranks of faceless techno artists who hid behind pseudonyms like T99, LFO and B12. Dancers have been increasingly monitored and vetted, steered into ticketed venues and subjected to invasive security checks, often ...”

“... as if his head had sprung an oil-can leak. He was nearly caught in a compromising position with a young actress pretending to be underage in the convoluted Borat Subsequent Moviefilm mockumentary. Then there was the shlock folly of the Four Seasons press conference held not at the regal Four Seasons hotel in Philadelphia, as was presumably intended, but at ...”

“... came later), investors were very likely to buy in. Venture capital firms hired cocaine-fuelled young MBAs to build up their operations. Many of the venture capital firms were leveraged up to their eyeballs because interest rates were at a historic low and because, in the US, the Taxpayer Relief Act (1997) had lowered the marginal rates on capital ...”

“... journalist who made the greatest name for himself on the 1897-98 expedition was George Steevens, a young Oxford graduate whose early radicalism was sacrificed to the Daily Mail’s shilling. Steevens conveyed the elementalism of the desert to his readers: ‘small broken hills … now they were diaphanous blue on the horizon, now soft purple as we ran under ...”

“... Barlocher, told his biographer Christopher Clarey, ‘but I had a good group with a lot of young boys with talent … I would never have guessed he would become what he would become.’ The opening chapters of The Master, Clarey’s book on Federer, are full of cautious early assessments of his potential.* His junior career peaked at the 1998 Wimbledon ...”

“... interested in ‘modes of solitude’; Checkout 19 gives us a portrait of the artist as a girl and young woman, reading her way into herself, discovering her vocation as a writer. In Big Kiss, Bye-Bye, the protagonist is a writer, and her writing has consequences in the world: winning her a readership and prizes (this tracks with Bennett’s own ...”

“... and thighs covered with scars – broad weals and lashes’. A ‘big splendid-looking Boras young man – with a broad good-humoured face like an Irishman – had a fearful cut on his left buttock. It was the last scab of what had been a very bad flogging. The flesh for the size of a saucer was black and scarred, and this crown of raw flesh was the size ...”

“... Back when the Independent was young and thriving, the paper used to sponsor lunchtime ‘theatre conferences’ at the Edinburgh Festival in association with the Traverse. The description ‘theatre conferences’ makes these public discussions sound starchier than they were. I was happy to do my bit chairing events in exchange for the train fare and somewhere to sleep ...”

“... doesn’t help that the IPs we get to hear about are usually the celebrities: Elton John and David Furnish; Annie Leibovitz; Kim Kardashian and Kanye West. Surrogacy is one of those subjects on which ‘colour-blind – white – feminism’ tends not to mince words. ‘A human-rights violation’, the journalist Julie Bindel called it in 2018 when the ...”