“... policy adviser on the NHS, Penny Dash, went on to join McKinsey, and a McKinsey senior partner, David Bennett, became Blair’s chief policy adviser, and later the chief executive of Monitor, the NHS regulator. The revolving door between McKinsey, regulators, policymakers and businesses is a consistent feature of the consulting businesses.Bogdanich and ...”

“... Labour’s Minister of Education, told the Association of Education Committees in 1968, ‘for young people to know the facts about Vietnam than it is to know all the details of the Wars of the Roses.’ These modernising tendencies were very much to the fore in CSE, the school-leaving examination introduced in 1964 with the aim of giving every ...”

“... over Occupied Europe on B-25 Mitchell bombers, and came home like thousands of other literate young Americans secretly hoping to dazzle the world with a novel about his war. But after his early success in placing stories, Heller put down his pen. Looked at with a cold eye, the early stories did not strike him as making quite the impact he had in mind. It ...”

“... to see if the reason for the leg pain could be emboli’. If this didn’t endear her ‘to the young men and women who made up the house staff’ so be it. Didion is a spellbinding writer: she isn’t necessarily likeable, or un-scary. ‘In time of trouble, I had been trained since childhood, read, learn, work it up, go to the literature. Information was ...”

“... child. Before the law, or outside it? ‘How is the institution of the removal centre legal?’ David Herd asks in his afterword to Refugee Tales (2016), a collection of stories gathered from refugees by campaigners. ‘Since, in conventional terms, it plainly offends legal principles, what relation does such a site have to the law?’ There are for the ...”

“... early response. It was used by government experts in media appearances: notoriously by David Halpern, head of the Behavioural Insights Team (aka the ‘Nudge Unit’), in a BBC News interview, but also by Patrick Vallance, the government’s chief scientific adviser. As late as 13 March, he told Radio 4 that one of the ‘key things we need to do ...”

“... entirely fitting for a piece written within the context of marital negotiations, especially by a young and attention-seeking poet. Dunbar is the first writer in Scots who can legitimately be called a ‘Court poet’. The Scottish kings had no great tradition of encouraging literary patronage, and indeed for much of Dunbar’s career at James IV’s Court ...”

“... the daily humiliation not just of being occupied but of being the occupier: Next, a husky young man, a teenager, pushed up to Lieutenant Ganci. He gestured to a rubbish pile that filled a vacant lot next to the shops and houses. In an overly loud voice he asked Ganci: ‘Why don’t you Americans clean up the garbage?’ Sighing, Ganci ...”

“... this from first-hand testimony from defectors, including Saddam’s own son-in-law.’ At Camp David on 7 September, Tony Blair said proof of a genuine nuclear threat had come in ‘the report from the International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA) this morning, showing what has been going on at the former nuclear weapon sites’. Saddam had killed his ...”

“... of undergraduates then (gleaned from movies like A Yank at Oxford with Robert Taylor) was of a young man in dressing-gown and slippers, a towel round his neck en route for the distant baths. I didn’t run to a dressing-gown and slippers either: ‘Nobody’ll mind if you just wear your raincoat,’ my mother reassuringly said. I wasn’t reassured but ...”

“... tradition of science as wholly inadequate to the serious advancement of scientific knowledge. As young men now applied themselves to the study of law, he argued, future scientists must devote themselves to the mastery of their respective disciplines. Responding to the call of Babbage and others for a new professionalism in the sciences, researchers and ...”

“... centre’ concerned with the local history of immigration. Above the tiny synagogue is the room of David Rodinsky, a Polish Jew of increasingly mysterious reputation. Latterly described as a translator and philosopher, he is said to have lived here in some sort of caretaking capacity. One day in the Sixties Rodinsky stepped out into Princelet Street and ...”

“... has been clumsy – so clumsy in the case of basic White House operations that the Republican David Gergen had to be brought in. Even now, Clinton could find better people to work for him; but there is the deeper problem of his own decision-making. Clinton refuses to decide by experience and instinct as most of his predecessors have mostly done. He tries ...”

“... he replies, ‘modestly’: ‘I served the Emperor of Ethiopia.’ And there is Milos Hrma, the young, timid railway signalman in Hrabal’s most famous novel, Closely Observed Trains. When he discovers that the stationmaster may become an Inspector of State Railways, he is excited, and reverently asks: ‘An inspector, like that … that’s the same rank ...”

“... his own. Not everyone in the business swooned in admiration when they first encountered Wal-Mart. David Glass, who years later succeeded Walton as chairman of the company, travelled down to Harrison, Arkansas, to see the opening of one of the new shops: It was the worst retail store I had ever seen. Sam had brought a couple of trucks of watermelons in and ...”