“... As Brian Barry suggests, the question of justice arises when custom loses its grip; when the prevailing social myth and what Stuart Hampshire calls its ‘fallacy of false fixity’ – that relations cannot be other than they are – is exposed. This is not to say that new fixed entities are never then proposed to replace the myth ...”

“... callous and even (through its agents) brutal. Take Moorehead’s approach to A.J.P Taylor’s breathtakingly naive rhetorical question at a CND meeting in 1958: ‘ “Is there anyone here who would do this to another human being?” Silence. “Then why are we making the damned thing?” Thunderous applause.’ Whatever happened at the ...”

“... what more could you wish for? ‘It was gold,’ as Joan Didion would say. The historian Taylor Branch visited Bill Clinton secretly at the White House once a month in the 1990s. On his first visit, in the spring of 1993, maxims and epigrams were flying about the place. Bill was quoting Suetonius, Hillary quoted Oscar Wilde, or so she ...”

“... Spark, A Far Cry from KensingtonOn​ the opening page of Craig Brown’s One Two Three Four, Brian Epstein and his personal assistant, Alistair Taylor, behold the Beatles for the very first time. It is November 1961, in a ‘dank and damp and smelly’ Liverpool basement, and the young band are ...”

“... since then, but he began appearing everywhere, live or guesting on recordings – with Carla Bley, Brian Eno, Fred Frith and his colleagues in Henry Cow. He was also learning a new bag of tricks: a sort of oral percussion based on breathing, all manner of hands-only drumming, including on a tea tray, fiddling around with keyboards, and returning to the ...”

“... Revolution sets out to tell the little-known story of Official republicanism for the first time. Brian Hanley and Scott Millar start with the appointment of Cathal Goulding as IRA chief of staff in 1962. A childhood friend of Brendan Behan, Goulding was about to turn 40 and had spent much of his adult life in Irish and British jails. He was to pick up the ...”

“... the rewards that came his way from England’s Eliza and her ministers. Six or seven years ago, Brian Phelan wrote a television play called Article Five, which was founded on data collected by Amnesty concerning the trade in instruments of torture and their use by governments pretty well everywhere. The BBC filmed the play but suppressed it at the last ...”

“... following the Blitz. The missing factor in Ponting’s analysis is popular patriotism. A.J.P. Taylor tells how, after the fall of France, strangers would stop him in the street and say: ‘Poor old Hitler. He’s done for himself now that he’s taken us on.’ Here was the consciousness tapped by Churchill and Priestley on the radio, a conviction that ...”

“... a treat by my editors at Condé Nast, who use the place as a sort of staff canteen. My old friend Brian McNally, demonstrating that le patron mange ici, occasionally lets me sit at his table. I have learned not to point and squeak and say: ‘Look, isn’t that the girl from Dirty Dancing!’ Everybody acts very unconcerned about celebrity, though you get the ...”

“... at a slave market. It is a theme that has been taken up by the former Miami Dolphins head coach Brian Flores, who is suing the NFL for discrimination after discovering that he was the token Black candidate when interviewed for coaching roles that had already been decided for white applicants. The lawsuit points out that although more than two-thirds of the ...”

“... little more than memorable speeches. Floyd’s death not only follows the killings of Breonna Taylor, an emergency medic shot dead while asleep in bed in her home in Kentucky by police officers looking for drug dealers operating out of a different house, and Ahmaud Arbery, a jogger murdered by a group of men who claimed to be making a ‘citizen’s ...”

“... not even regular exposure to the Ring cycle can assuage. Confidently predicting, in 1977, that Brian Inglis’s book Natural and Supernatural would be greeted by a chorus of rejection from terrified scientists, Levin never noticed that it was greeted by a chorus of indifference. Fantasising flat out, Levin insists that Science is blindly determined to deny ...”

“... that there should be more openness and transparency. In 2004, Paul Aylin and others, including Brian Jarman, an emeritus professor of primary care at Imperial College who had been on the panel of the Bristol inquiry, published figures in the BMJ comparing the performance of different units doing open-heart surgery on children under one year old during ...”

“... for a beautiful young woman to see to him as Jane Eyre looked after old Mr Rochester,’ Benjamin Taylor writes in his memoir, Here We Are. ‘What he got instead was me.’ Taylor was young, goyish and gay, all of which Roth was not. ‘I can’t be the first gay man to have been an older straight man’s ...”

“... and British Policy in Iran: The End of Informal Empire, 1941-53 (Bloomsbury, £28.99), Jack Taylor describes their lives of relative luxury at Grangemouth’s sister refinery in Abadan. (He suggests that the Scottish manager of the oil-linked Imperial Bank of Persia may have been responsible for introducing football to Iran.) In the 1950s Anglo-Persian ...”