“... eating, heating, working – are more pressing. It is hard to imagine that voters will applaud Jeffrey Donaldson for blocking any chance to solve them. The government’s plan to rip up the protocol, which would probably plunge Britain into a recession, may give him the pretext for a climbdown.A renewed conflict with Brussels may well also reanimate Brexit ...”

“... 25 June. By now, there was war within the party. One of the bitterest rows was between Trimble and Jeffrey Donaldson, the UUP member for Lagan Valley. Donaldson had been seen as a ‘moderate’ and a protégé of Trimble’s: now he ditched his leader to side openly and noisily with Paisley, Bob McCartney and the various anti-Agreement groupings. Trimble ...”

“... of men and women of the intellectual calibre of Bentham, the young John Stuart Mill, Francis Jeffrey, until recently editor of the Edinburgh Review, the Grotes, the Romillys, the Carlyles. A more weighty anchor to conventionality was her ten-year-old daughter Lucy. All this was now put in jeopardy by these dangerous letters. Inadvertent or intentional ...”

“... In his realist classic of 1984, First among Equals, Jeffrey Archer has a Labour minister from a Northern constituency disappearing with a prostitute for five minutes or so. She recognises Raymond Gould and turns to blackmail once the business is done. Gould refuses to deal and she takes her tale to Mike Molloy, a Mirror reporter ...”

“... to join was from me. It seemed to belong to a different era, but in fact it occurred only eight weeks before I became Chancellor. Our hero evidently doesn’t realise how ridiculous this sounds. Perhaps the memory was so painful it had to be denied – that at least is the charitable interpretation. (Anything less charitable would run into legal ...”

“... of the withdrawal just a few hours before the announcement). Yet on 12 October last year, two weeks after Putin’s aircraft started bombing Syrian targets, Russia’s Channel One broadcast an interview with him in which he clearly stated that Russia’s military intervention would be short-lived. ‘Our task is to stabilise the legitimate ...”

“... power of Whitney.The universal suspension of disbelief began in earnest only a few weeks after Whitney died, promoted by Tupac Shakur. Holograms depend on an illusion of depth, and at one time, depth seemed to be whatever was happening in Elvis Presley’s eyes. It was Sylvia Plath’s poetry, David Bowie’s soulful space nonsense or the ...”

“... a bass and a saxophone player. Jerry tries to persuade Poliakoff to give them the job – three weeks in Florida with Sweet Sue and her Society Syncopators – but Poliakoff tells them to beat it, they require female musicians. ‘Look, if William Morris doesn’t come through …’ Jerry says, as Joe drags him out the door. More recently, in ...”

“... to 25 December, at the end of a year corresponding to 1 BC, that all those fireworks, a few weeks ago, were marking his 2000th birthday in a meaningful way, that his mother was a virgin, that he rode into Jerusalem on an ass? Well, I am afraid all of that is almost certainly not true. These are late inventions, designed to fit what Old Testament ...”

“... in a garage three years ago. The garage-owning founder (now chief executive officer), Jeff (now Jeffrey) Bezos, was just 30. Apparently, in the early days, he would drive down to the local post office to dispatch orders by hand. Bezos is no tweedy ‘bookman’. He originally had 20 product categories in mind, but settled on books as the most appropriate ...”

“... design? – finds herself alone (that is, without husband or children) in Iran for a few weeks. She is a pretty, good-natured, scatty, conventional doctor’s wife, ‘more given to idle reflections than to purposive thought’, susceptible to attacks of guilt about her children: ‘sometimes she caught herself thinking of nothing at all and would ...”

“... was his real object – Lenny was being browbeaten for bringing in an outsider. A couple of weeks later, the Dunnes were at the Daisy – another hot place in town. Sinatra, his two daughters and Mia Farrow (to whom he was then engaged) were at another table. George, the restaurant captain, came over to the Dunnes’s table. ‘I’m so sorry, Mr ...”

“... strikingly reminiscent of the end of If ... The movie is riddled with intertextual jokes: Peter Jeffrey, who plays the headmaster in If ..., is a prison governor; teetering on a windowsill in a failed attempt to talk a working-class woman (Rachel Roberts) out of committing suicide, Travis reads her a poem by Adam Lindsay Gordon, Cheltenham College’s ...”

“... Todd McCarthy observed, this was the ‘decisive film’ in Hawks’s career. In two short weeks, it seems, Bacall acquired the husky voice we all know. And you can’t beat the lines Jules Furthman gave her – sometimes picking up on things Slim Hawks had said. Bacall was young, but she looked and sounded ancient in her wisdom – and she seemed to ...”

“... 1763 so gratefully received gifts of smallpox-infected blankets, arranged by the British general Jeffrey Amherst.In the 18th century, it was folk knowledge that milkmaids tended to be afflicted with the far more mild cowpox but rarely suffered smallpox. The Gloucestershire physician Edward Jenner knew this too, and the beginning of the end of smallpox came ...”