“... told him: ‘They’re made up. But that doesn’t mean they’re not true.’ The grandfather, David Cartwright, aka the Old Bastard or OB for short, knows what he’s talking about, as he was the power behind the throne at the Park for decades. The grandson, River Cartwright, once a promising recruit at the Park, has just been relegated to a dead-end job ...”

“... of biographical explanations of works of art’.* Others, however, including Katherine Duncan-Jones in her Arden edition of the Sonnets (1997, shortly to be reissued in a revised edition) and René Weis, in Shakespeare Revealed (2007), have continued to deal in biography: Duncan-Jones explores the case for William ...”

“... agreement about the infection idea. Shakespeare’s most recent biographer, Katherine Duncan-Jones, who incidentally thinks the young friend was William Herbert, not Southampton, has a good learned note in her edition about contemporary accounts of men getting burned by the female genitalia – ‘thus was his paradice turned into his purgatory . . . his ...”

“... bogeyman years, regularly invoked by politicians of all parties as the nadir of postwar Britain. David Cameron (though it could just as easily have been Gordon Brown) read out the charge sheet at a Demos meeting in 2006: ‘economic decline . . . inflation, stagnation and rising unemployment . . . deteriorating industrial relations’. Nearly 30 million ...”

“... employment. Aimed primarily at Asia and Central/Eastern Europe, the scheme was commended by David Blunkett as proof that the Government was ‘delivering nothing less than one of the world’s most flexible modern work permit systems. To maintain a buoyant economy we need to ensure employers can quickly fill key posts where shortages exist.’ This ...”

“... deployment of US forces would play into Baghdadi and Zawahiri’s hands. Towards the end of June, David Cameron told the House of Commons that Isis could take control of northern Iraq and set up a government there: ‘The people in that regime, as well as trying to take territory, are also planning to attack us here at home in the United Kingdom.’ It’s a ...”

“... the efforts of kindly Tommies in winning hearts and minds. Recent studies – for instance, David French’s excellent The British Way in Counter-Insurgency 1945-67 – show that in Malaya, Cyprus, Aden and Kenya British soldiers in fact displayed frequent brutality, often condoned by their officers. In all of Britain’s counterinsurgency ...”

“... should be reviewed.’ The secret agents are an astonishing batch. Among them is Reginald Teague-Jones, who received two obituaries in the Times, the first under his later name of Ronald Sinclair. The reason for the change of name was that he was falsely accused of a war crime in Transcaspia in 1918 when a clutch of Leninist commissars were taken from ...”

“... unreliable ghosted memoir of her own and a reminiscence by the founder of her British fan club, David Nathan, and its secretary, Sylvia Hampton. Potential biographers might have been put off by the resistance of Simone’s daughter, who doesn’t want to talk about her mother, and many former friends and colleagues who refused to be interviewed or give ...”

“... new medium. In 1952 he made contact with another producer looking for a TV project, Andrew Miller Jones. Miller Jones was an ex-Army officer with a yellow Rolls-Royce, the first of a large number of Panorama staff over the next fifty years with either a military background or an ostentatious personal style, or ...”

“... confidentiality). When the early human rights claim brought by Michael Douglas and Catherine Zeta-Jones over the intrusion into their wedding reception of a pirate photographer who sold his pictures to Hello! magazine came before the Court of Appeal, I suggested that the common law governing confidentiality had matured to a point at which the courts could ...”

“... get carried away beyond the merits of an originally sound case. Why, he goes on, do writers like David Pryce-Jones want the Parisians to have behaved like the people of Warsaw? It is certainly true that, as a result of their rising, the inhabitants of Warsaw managed to get their city largely razed to the ground. If Hitler ...”

“... skewed picture of the Crusades in Western scholarship.’ I’m not sure what he means by this. David Hume, in his History of Great Britain (1754-62), denounced the Crusades as ‘the most signal and durable monument of human folly that has yet appeared in any age or nation’. Gibbon considered them to be an expression of ‘savage fanaticism’. In a ...”

“... or put him to work: ‘No one is going to sivilise me. I been there before.’ Huck, like Tom Jones, is outside the reach of everybody’s charity. But another American orphan over whom I used to agonise, the orphan par excellence, is Ellen Montgomery, heroine of The Wide Wide World. Poor Ellen: no one ever wept so much, or was quite so miserable, as ...”

“... Rotten or Sid Vicious, eclipsing the group’s musical muscle: drummer Paul Cook, guitarist Steve Jones and bassist Glen Matlock. (It was Matlock who wrote nearly all the group’s best tunes, only to be pushed out for being a Beatles-loving middle-class namby.) Andrew Loog Oldham, who managed the Rolling Stones, was the crucial precursor in grasping that bad ...”