“... Jonah Barrington, began to invent nicknames for the various broadcasters: ‘Auntie Gush’, ‘Ursula the Pooh’, ‘Uncle Smarmy’. It amounted to an unofficial attempt to kill propaganda by ridicule. The broadcaster first christened ‘Lord Haw-Haw’ was probably Wolf Mittler, a German who had acquired a posh English accent, and who used to sign off ...”

“... Thousand Streets trilogy. In 1930, he tried to straighten out his love life by marrying Lois Martin, a woman he’d met at one of Priestley’s Hampstead drinks parties. He was, he told his mother as he broke the news by post, ‘incredibly happy – touch wood’. But the newlyweds soon agreed that they were ‘sexually incompatible’, and Lois took on ...”

“... the New Labour years. Kafka appears, like a special guest on The Simpsons; so do Badiou, Wall-E, Ursula Le Guin; and there’s a Marxist Supernanny, who’s very like the Supernanny of early 21st-century reality TV, except that instead of working with individual families, she puts whole social structures on the naughty step.There’s also a scary deep in ...”

“... and strangely neglected. As the bargaining reached its frenzied climax, leading Brexiters such as Martin Howe QC, a member of the Eurosceptic Tory MP Bill Cash’s self-styled Star Chamber, said that Johnson should reject the EU’s ‘one-sided and damaging trade agreement’: ‘Once the EU has pocketed its huge concessions on goods, with the UK getting ...”

“... the top prize – formally enjoy equal status under the president, currently the CDU politician Ursula von der Leyen. In reality, as the former director-general of the Legal Service, the all-purpose Brussels fixer Jean-Claude Piris (22 years in the saddle) pointed out in 2012, since this would mean that the fourteen commissioners from the Union’s smallest ...”