“... Even when my small son went to hospital, Schoen came along and spread out the data on the ward floor and we worked on them as the somewhat bemused little boy looked on.) Whereas others had tried to discern a ‘Powell effect’ by looking at constituency results in the West Midlands alone, we realised that Powellism was a national movement, visible in ...”

“... to name only a few. Yet almost at once there came rumblings from Cambridge. Maurice Cowling, John Vincent, Andrew Jones and others rightly emphasised the Victorian politician’s relative autonomy from popular pressure, and cleverly unveiled the feebleness of provincial and popular reformers when they tried to operate at Westminster or Whitehall. Since ...”

“... war veterans. Always averse to the psychoanalytical view of the world as one vast psychiatric ward, he argued that these men were not pathological cases, ‘shell-shocked’ or ‘psychoneurotic’. They had experienced dramatic disruptions, loss of everything familiar, all ‘sense of personal sameness and historical continuity’, and had plummeted into ...”

“... that the tracker had not been issued by the police but was the personal property of a GTTF cop, John Clewell, they contacted the FBI. It turned out that another officer in the unit lived next door to Anderson. What if the police had broken into Anderson’s flat? ‘I wasn’t even believing it as I was saying it,’ one of the drug detectives said. Leads ...”

“... over to the monks of Ampleforth to be crammed, successfully, for a history scholarship to Oxford. John Peet ended up as head of the Reuters bureau in Berlin, before defecting to the East in 1950. Gavin Ewart, whose poems now seem the high-spot of Out of Bounds, went to Cambridge with an exhibition to read classics; he left Wellington with some farewell verses ...”

“... are laid out in sequence, with dates and agendas. The voiceover narrative, written by Geoffrey Ward, is remorseless and untheatrical, just as Peter Coyote’s spoken narration is dry, unaccented and a little formal, as if reading out a casualty report. But Burns and Novick seem to understand how specious it would be to make this a tidy, organised report ...”

“... high-explosive bombs and rockets. Six months ago, Turkey’s deployment of its homegrown drones to ward off an Assad government offensive in Syria’s Idlib province had glowing reviews from commentators such as Charles Lister of the Middle East Institute in Washington DC, who wrote that the weapons had ‘transformed the strategic dynamic 180 degrees’ in ...”

“... though more often in the background. Martin Middlebrook’s The First Day on the Somme and John Keegan’s The Face of Battle are the mini-masterpieces I remember from school; this century, Antony Beevor, Max Hastings and Holland have led the British pack. The history of war is now certainly more palatable to academia: King’s College, London has a ...”

“... Arms. (The reproduction ‘made such an impression on me and so many others of my generation’, John Richardson later wrote.) The painting was shown in a Mayfair gallery, where it was bought by Michael Sadler, whose collection included work by Kandinsky, Rouault and Modigliani. Bacon’s next ambitious work was called Wound for a Crucifixion. ...”

“... building, a 16th-century revision of the 13th-century church founded by the Knights of St John. The Hole is a statement and it is properly capitalised. The labourers, a self-confessed art collective, work the Hole by hand, with pick and shovel, turn and turn about: four days to complete a grave shaft, without any of the tortured grinding and ...”

“... we were all such boys.’ This is how I remember my early days working for the BBC in the 1960s. John Fortune, John Bird, Keith Waterhouse and Willis Hall: we were all such boys too and it seemed such play. Less play was Beyond the Fringe, but that had its sillier side. Dudley Moore had an act – never, I think, done in ...”

“... and more than six hundred official Twitter accounts for everyone from head office to local council ward policing teams. ‘We have tremendous content,’ Scotland Yard’s head of media told PR Week in 2017.When times are good, the Met is celebrated for its model of ‘policing by consent’, which has been exported to countries such as Australia and Canada ...”

“... the help he got from Gamlin. Forbes wrote to him at the BBC – at the time Forbes’s name was John Theobald Clarke – and Gamlin wrote back, telling Forbes that his letter was so extraordinary he would have to meet him. When they met Gamlin said it would be necessary for him to change his name. ‘Another young actor, ahead of me,’ Forbes wrote years ...”

“... last illness. He talks about hospital services being deliberately run down and the difficulties of ward care due to shortage of staff but it’s only gradually I realise that what he wants is for me to try and write a play about it. I explain what a slow worker I am and how long the trek from conception to execution but it still sounds like an excuse. He’s ...”

“... of my childhood. 10 February. Finish with some regret Frances Spalding’s book on the Pipers, John and Myfanwy, the latter figuring in The Habit of Art where she is to some extent disparaged. I’ve always been in two minds about Piper, liking him when I was young with his paintings ‘modern’ but representational enough to be acceptable, a view I ...”