“... more so because he was speaking immediately after his political chief, the health secretary Jeremy Hunt. Provocatively, Stevens compared the situation in Britain now to the time of the NHS’s birth in 1948, seventy years ago – ‘an economy in disarray, the end of empire, a nation negotiating its place in the world, a need for massive house ...”

“... there, but nobody noticed that, after primary school, Ronnie Pinn was there too, until 1980. In my hunt for the real Ronnie, I thought several times that I saw him in grainy photos posted by ex-pupils on Friends Reunited. Was he not the boy in the white shirt at the edge of a photograph taken in front of the school in 1980, with kids tumbling over each other ...”

“... and, separately, from the United States Military Assistance Command, Vietnam, whose boss, General William Westmoreland, had the Shakespearean sounding title of COMUSMACV. (In the flesh, Westy came over more as a hard-driving business executive.) On one busy day in the flourishing Saigon black market I bought an American fatigue uniform, boots, jungle hat and ...”

“... selected Letters, maintains exactly that same odd poise vis-à-vis experience. When his brother William wrote him half-disapprovingly and half-anxiously about some of Henry’s more difficult, high-life but off-colour French friends who had descended on them, he replied with quiet satisfaction that he had known just how it would be: ‘It strikes me exactly ...”

“... Museum says. The couple were illustrious knights of the royal chamber of Richard II, Sir William Neville and Sir John Clanvowe, ‘the Castor and Pollux of the Lollard movement’, as the medieval historian Bruce McFarlane called them. Neville died just four days after Clanvowe, the inscription records, in October 1391. The Westminster Chronicle ...”

“... industry propelled him to the presidency of the SAG. From that platform, he enlisted in the witch hunt – naming names, wrecking careers, ruining lives. He claimed to have accused no individuals in public, but he certainly did so in private. For years, he minimised the importance of the blacklist or denied its existence, even as he assisted in implementing ...”

“... Potter Trivia Evening; it had a Christmas card competition, and one girl was picked to meet Prince William. The school leadership is new, the trust that oversees the running of the school has a new name and the school itself will shortly get a new name too; the most recent monitoring visit from Ofsted showed definite progress. But schools know they are in ...”

“... 1893, when she was nineteen, she enrolled at the Harvard Annex, studying with George Santayana and William James. She seemed set to become a psychologist. But she preferred travelling to studying, and without waiting to graduate she went to Florence to visit Leo, who was training to become a maven of art. It was around this time that Stein began her first ...”

“... Aspects, Woolf said that if she were writing a book about fiction she would feel she must ‘hunt a little’. That sounds like fair comment. Among other contemporaries there were novelists who took a keen practitioner’s interest in developing new ways of relating fabula and syuzhet and, as a mark of their difference, avoiding the straightforward ...”

“... Seals were not happy,’ the retired official said. But most of them kept quiet, as did Admiral William McRaven, who was then in charge of JSOC. ‘McRaven was apoplectic. He knew he was fucked by the White House, but he’s a dyed-in-the-wool Seal, and not then a political operator, and he knew there’s no glory in blowing the whistle on the ...”

“... Remember the images of Angelina Jolie walking across the stage, hand outstretched to greet William Hague at their ‘summit’ on rape as a war crime in London in 2014? It struck me then that she was being offered as a trade-off or collateral damage in the effort to bring such violence to an end. The initiative is now seen as a costly failure; the ...”

“... 1991 – in London the father worked as a volunteer for the Patriotic Union of Kurdistan. At the William Morris Academy in Hammersmith, where she was a pupil, Heshu repeatedly expressed her fear of a forced marriage, but teachers ignored her. When her parents discovered her relationship with a Christian Lebanese boy, she ran away from home – her ...”