“... of being a spy or a commando, then transferred to a naval prison, where he remained until late May, when he was cleared after an investigation. A month later he boarded a ship to London with a group of eighty other French citizens. ‘The volunteer Grumbach produced a very good impression,’ his interrogator in London wrote, and issued him a Number One ...”

“... been the fate of every other government which came to power to tidy up the Communist mess. Gaidar may have been used to the world of power and influence, but none of the others, save briefly Shokhin, had climbed the long Soviet ladder to power: they had been catapulted into office at what was for a gerontocratic country a ludicrously young age. They soon ...”

“... England’s varied landscapes – sometimes neutralised as picturesque garden features, as at Richard Tracey’s Cotswold mansion, which cannibalised parts of the former Hailes Abbey; sometimes gaunt safety hazards like Crowland Abbey church, where the tottering nave roof-vaults (twin to those in Westminster Abbey) loomed over the parish church and across ...”

“... to the analysis makes the point that while the rigour and complexity of the statistical analysis may have ensured an authoritative answer to the question ‘Was Bristol an outlier?’, that very complexity made it harder to answer the really pressing question: ‘Shouldn’t the Bristol surgeons have known that they were outliers?’ After the Bristol ...”

“... the improvised rockets was ‘unlikely’ to be more than two kilometres. Postol and a colleague, Richard M. Lloyd, published an analysis two weeks after 21 August in which they correctly assessed that the rockets involved carried a far greater payload of sarin than previously estimated. The Times reported on that analysis at length, describing Postol and ...”

“... the more senior General Ali Kuli Khan (who was at college with me in Lahore). Sharif’s reasoning may have been that Musharraf, from a middle-class, refugee background like himself, would be easier to manipulate than Ali Kuli, who came from a landed Pathan family in the NWFP. Whatever the reasoning, it turned out to be a mistake. On Bill Clinton’s ...”

“... fronting both magazines at the same time. In June 1974, two months before Watergate drove his boss Richard Nixon from office, Newsweek portrayed Kissinger as ‘Super K’ in full hero outfit, muscles rippling, cape swirling. He knew it was too good to last: those whom the gods wish to destroy they first dress up as Superman. Gewen describes the absurdity of ...”

“... a sweatbox, a spell trapped on a desert island. The bizarre thing is that for Simenon they may also have represented a welcome easing-off and slackening of the pace: during the hack period of his early twenties, he would work every day until he had written eighty typed pages. Then he’d throw up. That’s how you write 150 books in seven years.The ...”

“... girls who had skived off school to shout obscenities about Blair’s decision to go to war. In May 1978 it was the assembly point for the seven thousand Bangladeshis who marched behind Ali’s coffin to Downing Street. Young people in the area were beginning to distance themselves from their parents, whom they had come to see as passive. Their mothers were ...”

“... in his chequered family background. Two recent books, biographies of his father and his mother, may help to provide a genealogy of disappointment – a fuller explanation of how Obama came so grievously to disappoint his supporters as well as, perhaps, himself. Sally Jacobs’s The Other Barack tells the sad story of the president’s father. Despite ...”

“... the epistemic credentials of psychoanalysis, I take its explanatory power to be self-evident. You may not wish to commit yourself ontologically to some thing called the ‘unconscious’, and you may reasonably object to many of the details of the orthodox Freudian picture. (For example, the idea of penis envy, as Simone de ...”

“... parakeets, which are spreading rapidly in London (a large colony at Sunbury apparently) and may one day oust the pigeons. Yorkshire, 29 March. The conductor on the GNER train to Leeds is now styled Customer Operations Leader and announces himself as such, though (and it’s to his credit) he stumbles several times when he has to broadcast this ...”

“... is an attribute which is almost never applicable to performing musicians. However great they may be, they have no importance. To understand why Gould was the exception to this rule, we need to look at what it was that he, as the Nichtakzeptierer (to use Bernhard’s word), did not accept.An advertisement for Yamaha pianos has the headline ‘Performing ...”

“... on to Marx, Althusser, Poulantzas and Gramsci. ‘Quote marks’ round words, when ‘concepts’ may be ‘novel’. Italics – lots of them – when something is important and the teachers want to make sure you’re getting it down. There had been a Centre for Contemporary Cultural Studies at Birmingham University since ...”