“... presence. On another occasion, Maugham ‘gave him an icy stare’ as Ann Fleming – wife of Ian – chastised him ‘by banging a serving spoon on his offensively prominent ear trumpet’. Christopher Isherwood, on the other hand, found that Maugham’s stammer ‘somehow made you feel that you were stammering, not he’. Raymond Mortimer noted his ...”

“... him – its editor, Alan Rusbridger, showed concern for his position, as did the then deputy, Ian Katz, and others – but he talked about its journalists in savage terms. The Guardian felt strongly that the secret material ought to be redacted to protect informants or bystanders named in it, and Julian was inconsistent about that. I never believed he ...”

“... be ‘inspected’ at the border as they had been ‘during the Troubles’. In September, Karen Bradley admitted that she hadn’t known the people of Ulster tended to vote along sectarian lines when she became secretary of state for Northern Ireland. In December, Priti Patel said that the threat of food shortages in Ireland should have been used to ...”

“... was doing the rounds showing a Ukrainian soldier stepping out of the rear door of an American-made Bradley IFV and immediately being blown up by a mine. (He survived, minus a leg.)‘You’re watching the counter-offensive? It’s hard,’ I said to the driver in Russian. He was an older man; he might not speak English, I don’t speak Ukrainian, and I thought ...”