“... London dispatched no less a figure than the chief of the Imperial General Staff, Field Marshal Sir John Harding. Within a month of his arrival in 1955, he told the cabinet with brutal candour that if self-determination was ruled out, ‘a regime of military government must be established and the country run indefinitely as a police state.’ He was as good as ...”

“... though even less tolerant towards ‘Rome’, was less solidly home-grown in inspiration. John Knox’s church drew its theological ideas from constant European travel, the movement of black-clad divines between Edinburgh and the Calvinist centres in Geneva, the Netherlands and Germany.The third attempt to turn the white cliffs into a red line is the ...”

“... two years, involving 25 general anaesthetics, a ten-stone weight gain, thromboses, more than one major haemorrhage, fistula and infections. She barely survived, though none of this has stopped her from going on to lead one of the most effective campaigning lives as a transsexual woman. In 1931, Lili Elbe died after a third and failed operation to create an ...”

“... were awaited with interest. Since it opened to the public in 1985, the Saatchi collection in St John’s Wood has become a focus of what’s called the contemporary art debate. With every purchase, names are made and names are called. But Saatchi’s taste, his collecting policy, is eclectic and elusive. So much art, of so many kinds, has passed into and ...”

“... Abbey and carted off the Stone of Scone. No one in Scotland seems in the least impressed with John Major’s imaginative gesture: they’ve got more sense, though with the relic up for grabs there was an undignified scramble between various venues wanting it for its commercial and tourist potential. In this sense it’s very much in the tradition of ...”

“... ever met McCorvey; ‘Jane Roe’ was just a common pseudonym for a woman in legal proceedings, as John Roe (sometimes Poe, Doe or Hoe) was for a man. Coffee would probably have continued to work on the case by herself if she hadn’t received a phone call from her old law school classmate Sarah Weddington. They weren’t friends, but Weddington had a question ...”

“... where Himes settled in 1953 and spent more than a decade, that he found himself celebrated as a major writer, the poète maudit of black America. Like his mentor Faulkner (and later Cormac McCarthy), Himes appealed to a Parisian readership convinced of the essential savagery of American life. ‘What the great body of Americans most disliked’ about his ...”

“... point of view of conventional rock management – at first. The Sex Pistols were dropped by two major labels in quick succession before signing with Virgin; their concerts were banned by local councils across the country; ‘God Save the Queen’ was the bestselling single in the country in the week of the Silver Jubilee, despite being silenced on the radio ...”

“... transference, the fact cannot be got round that the patient who obeys the basic rule has broken a major taboo, exposing his most chaotic, unbridled, shameful, undignified, emotionally incontinent, and maybe downright unpleasant, self to another human being with no possible way of telling what that other human being really thinks about what he has heard or ...”

“... that the forename is a tribute to Arthur Rimbaud, whose poetry and lifestyle were undoubtedly a major influence; and that the surname is taken from a small village in Burgundy (now Cravant) where his first wife, Renée Bouchet, came from.He was born Fabian Avenarius Lloyd, in a residential suburb of Lausanne, on 22 May 1887, the second son of a well-to-do ...”

“... like Dadie [Rylands] shun me. I am so distinguished yet so undistinguished,’ he writes. John Barton snubs him, showing ‘coltish contempt’; ‘I am so accustomed to being liked or at worst ignored, and my reputation awes people into civility – even if they think I don’t deserve it.’ In general, he says, ‘I like an evening where I talk a ...”

“... performance as ‘bordering on disaster’. A week later, the head of the Metronet consortium, John Weight, was sacked. The big, meaty capital programmes that the PPP was supposed to ‘incentivise’ Metronet to do weren’t happening. None of the eight stations it was supposed to have refurbished are finished, and track renewals are way behind ...”

“... Gay, Max Schur – I was now struck by just how exposed and vulnerable Freud was to the ills, major and petty, of the times, and by the fierce contrasts in his moods between blindness and insight, equanimity and dismay. Freud was articulate about what he personally found most insufferable: debt was his greatest fear (by the end of the war he had lost 95 ...”

“... bandmates were actually more bewildered than bothered by this latest development: despite his major rep as a real ladies’ man, no one had him pegged as the next Valentino. This was a scrawny, underfed-looking Italian kid with big ears: there was definitely something of a semolina dough Mickey Mouse about his looks. But he obviously gave off some subtle ...”

“... and unsystematic. In 2014, the Historical Enquiries Team was closed down. The PSNI was making major cuts and an investigation by the police inspectorate the previous year had found that the agency was failing to properly investigate state-linked killings. The Legacy Investigation Branch that replaced it was smaller and even less well resourced: in ...”