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“... were pro-life. Prominent Republicans, including (for much of their careers) Ronald Reagan and George H.W. Bush, were often pro-choice on principle – they were, after all, meant to be the defenders of individual liberty. Many states would probably have eventually liberalised abortion laws on their own. In 1970, abortion was legal in two, Oregon and ...”

“... scratch round-up of whoever’s available and an exercise we went through both with The Madness of George III and The Lady in the Van partly to find out how long the play is likely to be and also to get some notion of what it’s about. And it is helpful, though painful and embarrassing too as some sections are far from finished, the characters scarcely ...”

“... take on this touchy matter is provided by Sinatra’s long-time (African-American) valet, George Jacobs. In his immensely entertaining memoir Mr S: The Last Word on Frank Sinatra (2003), he defends Sinatra and the other Rat Pack roustabouts, and says the only people he ever got a real nasty sizzle of racism from were a few Mafia bosses, and the ...”

“... landing or shooting or climbing The Big One: Mailer as Babe Ruth wanting to ‘hit the longest ball ever to go up into the accelerated hurricane air of our American letters’ or Hemingway, who ‘wouldn’t fight Dr Tolstoi in a 20-round bout because I know he would knock my cars off’. Obviously, what Hawthorne had dismissed as a band of ‘scribbling ...”

“... sometime in the early 1980s at Drury Lane in an Amnesty concert, The Secret Policeman’s Other Ball, and a sketch I did with John Fortune. Two upper-class figures are comparing notes about sex, one of them picking up lorry drivers (or what he fondly imagines to be lorry drivers) in the lavatories of Notting Hill, the other claiming to have exuberant sex ...”

“... where a mobster beats his pregnant girlfriend to death. Chase took it as a compliment. When Alan Ball was co-writing Grace under Fire for ABC, ‘people’s assistants were coming up and giving me notes, like “I don’t like the colour of the wall on that set.”’ When he moved to HBO to make Six Feet Under, the feedback on his pilot script was: ‘Could ...”

“... reactions differed even on the recognition of the Origin’s literary qualities: George Eliot sourly considered the book ‘ill-written and sadly wanting in illustrative facts’, lacking ‘luminous and orderly presentation’, and Karl Marx complained about ‘the clumsy English style’.) As Richard Horton observed in a special issue of ...”

“... O.R. Walkey claimed to have discovered the centre of the universe. The idea of the universe as a ball – ‘a kind of giant potato dumpling or bombe glacée’, as Luxemburg wrote to Luise Kautsky – is ‘certainly rubbish’, a ‘completely fatuous petty-bourgeois conception’. ‘We are talking about nothing more and nothing less than the infinity of ...”

“... after the game in the VIP rooms of a local strip club. The poster featured a lipstick-stained golf ball, but the event was cancelled due to adverse publicity.The president spends an average of two and a half days a week playing golf at one of his resorts. The government has paid at least $108 million for these excursions; this includes the rooms and meals for ...”

“... claim – ‘instead of a state, we got a ministry in charge of garbage disposal’ – but the ball is now in the world’s court to recognise Palestine as a state. Abbas’s plan to make his declaration in September is a gamble. Fayyad has long questioned the tactical wisdom of declaring statehood unilaterally while the occupation remains deeply ...”

“... Guard along the length of the frontier. The bill is sponsored by John McCain (Arizona), who, like George W. Bush, was once an immigration liberal but sees where the votes have come to lie in recent years. Two highly visible protagonists in the immigration drama, Salvador Reza and the Republican state senator, Russell Pearce, embody the tensions in ...”

“... rolled from France into a depression over southern England and all but locked into place, like a ball in a cup. When the thick clouds in this air mass burst, they dumped extraordinary intensities of rain. It rained most ferociously on and around the Cotswolds. On Friday afternoon, Pershore, just north of Tewkesbury, was experiencing ten millimetres of rain ...”

“... I asked him to tell me about his family history a glint appeared in Jim’s eye. ‘My grandfather George was born in 1860,’ he said, ‘and he worked as a butcher and a restaurant owner up in London, near St Paul’s. My father was Arch Fordham and he started a farm in Berkshire, but my mother, Elsie, who was born in 1901, her family was called ...”

“... Marten’s paternal grandmother, Mary Anna Sturt Marten, was a goddaughter of the Queen Mother; George VI attended her wedding. Marten’s father had been a page to Queen Elizabeth II. The papers ran stories about the once carefree aristocrat who had grown up on the £34 million Crichel Estate in Dorset but had suddenly cut off all contact with her family ...”

“... but looks younger, with a dot of a beard and an elegant green linen V-neck. Rod Read, Legay’s George Best lookalike vocalist, and Legay Rogers, the original drummer, have died of cancer, but there’s not much wrong with John Knapp. The unexpected, for him, is not just that he’s alive, or that he’s not in the least bit frail at 69, and doesn’t ...”