“... Bon Marché, named after Boucicaut’s Paris store although it was founded by a Londoner called David Lewis. Between 1920 and 1924 it was given an art deco makeover and was regarded as ‘one of the finest examples of modern architecture that Liverpool possesses’. There were also Owen Owen and Lewis’s, which catered for customers from the middle and ...”

“... getting the clap,’ he remembered. In descriptions by himself and others, he emerges as a feral young fellow who did not let much bother him. But there are interesting moments when he takes a moral position; for example, when Dylan Thomas, who annoyed him by making assumptions about his relationship with Spender, irritated him further by boasting how well ...”

“... party, both started out as ‘terrorists’. Begin was behind the 1946 bombing of the King David Hotel, which killed nearly a hundred civilians; Shamir planned the 1948 kidnapping and assassination of the UN representative Folke Bernadotte. Yitzhak Rabin, revered among liberal Zionists as a peacemaker, oversaw the deportation of tens of thousands of ...”

“... presumably, many straight readers. Perhaps a few more gay male writers – Paul Monette, David Leavitt and Armistead Maupin in the US, Alan Hollinghurst, Paul Bailey, Adam Mars-Jones in Britain – enjoy this crossover status. International comparisons, however, can be misleading, since they disguise the very different ways in which each country is ...”

“... whole world is turning into one big market for merchandise.’ In Amman in 1995, he meets a young man who hands him a business card reading ‘Jihad al-Wazir, Managing Director, World Trade Centre, Gaza, Palestine’. His father was Abu Jihad, commander of Palestinian military operations on the West Bank. On meeting him, Friedman thought to ...”

“... he wrote to Michel Strauss, a student at Harvard: Hungary is a very romantic cause; all sorts of young men want to go there and die for liberty, although plainly they cannot be of any use now that the Russians have crushed the resistance. But they very properly feel that something must be done, that awful things are happening, that one cannot be supine, and ...”

“... British soldiers, French veterans from Algeria and Belgian mercenaries were recruited by Colonel David Stirling’s company, Watchguard International Ltd, for operations behind enemy lines. In the South too the nationalists were divided, with Cairo backing the Front for the Liberation of South Yemen (FLOSY) and more radical groups congregating under the ...”

“... the Communist Party (the Jewish Arab List) and MKs associated with Zionist parties, especially David Ben Gurion’s Labour. He looks at wedding songs to trace the different streams of Palestinian political behaviour. He finds informers who snitched on their neighbours and on people they saw in the village shop or on the city bus; who reported things they ...”

“... Basaglia’s roots were in Venice, his background bourgeois, his sympathies anti-fascist. As a young man in December 1944 he was arrested and held in harsh prison conditions by the occupying Nazis until their expulsion from the city the following April. He studied medicine in Padua, where he specialised in mental and nervous diseases but read widely in ...”

“... have something here.’ On receiving this verdict from the poet Josephine Miles in 1951, the young Ammons was taken aback: he’d expected ‘bad news’. Yet whatever the something was that Mr Ammons had, it remained hidden from view for some time. He brought out his first volume, Ommateum, with a vanity press in 1955, and, as he drily observed, ‘it ...”

“... In March 2018, clearly acting on existing suspicions, a South African TV camera homed in on the young Australian player Cameron Bancroft, who in an excruciating sequence of events could be seen doing something to the ball, then hiding something in his trousers, then protesting his innocence to the umpires: look, ump, nothing in my pockets, honest! In the ...”

“... of motherhood and ‘my inexplicable (to him) decision to reproduce’: ‘I said that having a young child around all the time was like having a houseguest who never said anything and never left.’ She pointed out the guest’s childlike characteristics:[It is] smaller than anyone in the family … has a peculiar appearance … and does not understand ...”

“... be defined by the Baby Boomers versus the students [and] mainstream parties will need to get these young voters on side if they are to survive.’ ‘Dave … tells me that I should join his political unit. I groan and say: “Oh God, don’t ask me to do that – I wouldn’t be able to say no.”’ He doesn’t. The Cameron Tories were really, it seems, as ...”

“... partly as a result of the fact that newspapers are now largely read by the over-fifties, while young people are far more likely to have gone to university. For a host of reasons (not least that its current leader is a journalist), the Tory Party has effectively become the political arm of the press, while routinely complaining about the cultural influence ...”

“... associated. The purge of 1519, for instance, which has so engrossed Gwyn’s bête noire David Starkey, was ‘a storm in a tea-cup’. The truth, pronounces Gwyn, is that the political world of Wolsey’s ascendancy was ‘not an environment where faction flourished’. It was nevertheless an environment where the Duke of Buckingham got his head ...”