“... and British (if not also American) governments was made clear when it was echoed word for word by Jack Straw in the House of Commons. The formula allowed the government to give the public the impression that Libya was indeed guilty, while also allowing Tripoli to say that it had admitted nothing of the kind. The statement does not even mention al-Megrahi by ...”

“... year of US $26,000, higher than that of Britain, Australia or Canada. Under the discreet Union Jack and omnipresent portrait of the Queen (governors, mostly former diplomats, kept a low profile) it was as stable, secure and friendly to money-making as any place on earth has ever been. There was no audible call for local self-rule, a strange idea to most of ...”

“... one night in Waukegan, Illinois – fabled town: was it not the Waukegan conservatory that taught Jack Benny the violin? – the brothers looked past the footlights and saw at the piano, inexplicably, the wandering right hand of Chico, whom they had long since written off. Harpo, wearing a fruit-covered hat, plucked an apple and an orange, Chico dodged and ...”

“... buy copies from the Big Issue’s distributor for 20 pence and then sell them at the cover price of 50 pence. Most of the regular vendors I spoke to shifted around thirty copies a day. Charismatic, friendly showmen sold a lot more; those who drank or looked dirty sold fewer. An old vendor I spoke to at Oxford Circus said the secret was to ‘smile a ...”

“... to the IMF and the European Commission. For any periodical, an organisational function exacts a price – typically, a reluctance to shock its readers, a failing of which the journal has not been free. Yet its animating role has been remarkable. Four years later, Le Monde diplomatique and ATTAC were instrumental in creating the World Social Forum in Porto ...”

“... at night. On one occasion Coral Browne was coming away from the house with her husband, Vincent Price, and they were talking quietly. ‘Pipe down,’ snapped the voice from the van, ‘I’m trying to sleep.’ For someone who had brought terror to millions it was an unexpected taste of his own medicine. December 1974 Miss S. has been explaining to me why ...”

“... out, quitting the apprenticeship. But Hammond’s insistence on extracting from Keats the full price expected for his room and board cost him nearly £1000. Finished with Hammond but not yet with medicine, he moved his studies to Guy’s Hospital. There he studied under Astley Cooper, a student of John Hunter and like his mentor an insatiable ...”

“... reading of the scant facts given might lead us to think he has in fact had an affair with Jack Barrett, the young working-class man he has repeatedly given lifts to late at night, but the emotional logic of the film requires us to take his word for it that he hasn’t: ‘I stopped seeing him because I wanted him.’ The snapshot taken with a ...”

“... accession was still unresolved when midnight struck on 14 August 1947 and the Union Jack was lowered for the last time. Independence. There were now two armies in the subcontinent, each commanded by a British officer and with a very large proportion of British officers in the senior ranks. Lord Mountbatten, the Governor-General of India, and ...”

“... and on Instagram and Facebook, too. ‘I love England,’ she wrote in one post, next to a Union Jack, and ‘Live in London’, beside an emoji of a small house and a very green tree. She liked to imagine that one day she would live in a house like that with her husband, Hassan, and their two daughters. Hassan used to work at the mosque. Later on, when he ...”