“... preposterous contraption of regeneration, whereby at moments of dire depletion, the Doctor may collapse, shimmer a bit and re-emerge shortly afterwards, in the body and person of someone new. Audience figures were nothing special to begin with. But it turned out that the show’s young producer, Verity Lambert, had ignored her boss’s instructions ...”

“... Trade Center, the harbour beyond and then the American continent. During Fleet Week, at the end of May, a US aircraft carrier group would dock at the Midtown piers – the carrier seemed to dwarf the Twin Towers. Looking down at the streets below, you could see lines of sailors in white uniforms looking like trains of ants weaving their way into the city. My ...”

“... thereanent.’ Lear’s nonsense is full of mistakes that both the characters and their creator may or may not want to make, and Jenny Uglow’s absorbing new biography brings to the fore the question of the relation of his creativity to the accidence of his experience. In his diaries Lear often quotes or invokes his ...”

“... slip the content straight down the reader’s throat, for content is what matters most. This may beg a lot more questions, but except to critics it is clear enough. When W.H. Davies says he saw the wind dragging the corn by her golden hair into a dark wood, the startling and exciting information goes straight inside us. Complex reactions then ...”

“... with the most hard-line reverting to attitudes current in 1969. The success of Sinn Féin in the May elections added fuel to the fire, while the death of Elizabeth II and the recent census result, showing a Catholic majority in the North, are sure to increase unease.But loyalism has never been just one thing, and in Northern Protestants Susan McKay finds ...”

“... On 23 May 1949, Lionel Gamlin, producer of the Light Programme’s Hello Children, wrote to Enid Blyton to ask whether she would be willing to be interviewed about the best holiday she could remember. ‘Dear Mr Gamlin,’ Blyton wrote the next day. ‘Thank you for your nice letter. It all sounds very interesting but I ought to warn you of something you obviously don’t know, but which has been well known in the literary and publishing world for some time – I and my stories are completely banned by the BBC as far as children are concerned ...”

“... in for Aglietta’s absent sovereign power. On every occasion that panic came to a head – in May and November 2010 with the Greek and Irish bailouts; summer 2011 with tremors over Spanish and Italian bonds; November and December 2011 with the ousting of Papandreou and Berlusconi, followed by Cameron’s veto of the Fiscal Compact treaty; and summer 2012 ...”

“... sometime between 1808 and 1812. Like Goya’s better-known images of the Madrid uprising of 2 May 1808 and the bloody retribution that came after, the painting depicts the calamitous violence of the Peninsular War, which followed Napoleon’s invasion of Spain. But while Goya’s intentions are clear in El Dos and El Tres de Mayo, it is much less obvious ...”

“... nuclear threat. ‘Those who would measure the timetable for Saddam’s atomic programme in years may be seriously underestimating that situation and the gravity of the threat,’ he claimed. An article in Time Magazine in December asked ‘How soon will Saddam get the bomb?’ It concluded: ‘Not nearly so soon as the Bush Administration claims.’ Stories ...”

“... head, rather than worn in a tight knot. I have never seen him dressed like that before, though it may have nothing to do with his recent ‘accident’. ‘Shlonak, Sheikh?’ I ask how he is in Iraqi Arabic. ‘Al hamdullilah’ (‘God be praised’). ‘Ahlan wa sahlan’ (‘Welcome’). ‘And I you, Mr Rory,’ he says, in a rare phrase of English, and ...”

“... centre’ concerned with the local history of immigration. Above the tiny synagogue is the room of David Rodinsky, a Polish Jew of increasingly mysterious reputation. Latterly described as a translator and philosopher, he is said to have lived here in some sort of caretaking capacity. One day in the Sixties Rodinsky stepped out into Princelet Street and ...”

“... of Clinton’s disastrous Presidency with the new prominence of the Family Values theme may now be in the process of creating not merely one but two new parties: one for anti-FV Republicans, and a second for socially conservative white Democrats, as opposed to old Republicans and so-called coalition Democrats (i.e. very-liberal ...”

“... that pop into your head. Does that sound pretentious?’ Giving four answers and a qualification may have been characteristic: ‘We haven’t got a message really; the lyrics are open to interpretation. They’re multi-dimensional. You can read into them whatever you like. Obviously they’re important to the band.’ These sentences aren’t the usual ...”

“... the pro-Union vote was divided among Labour, the Tories, the Liberal Democrats and, strange as it may seem, the SNP, which downplayed any talk of independence and masqueraded instead as Authentic Old Labour. Under normal circumstances, the SNP would have interpreted its 56-seat triumph as a mandate to negotiate independence. But at the current juncture, in ...”

“... killing of 13 demonstrators in October 2000, to Benjamin Netanyahu’s election day warning last May: ‘Arab voters are coming out in droves to the polls. Left-wing organisations are busing them out.’ The spectre of ‘Arab voters’ was hardly new: the Israeli right has never looked fondly on Arabs exercising their voting rights, unless they can be ...”