“... bosses dined early with their families in ersatz châteaux and the legendary jazz scene – Truman may have heard Charlie Parker live – was a middle-class affair found in labour union halls rather than bordellos. Two Irish gangs, the Goats and the Rabbits, fought for control of the city. Tom Pendergast, the cunning, sickly boss of the Goats, ran his ...”

“... complaints about European free-riders. Others attribute its origins to the persuasive powers of Ernest Bevin (‘his crowning achievement’, in the words of the new foreign secretary, David Lammy). Apps describes Bevin as ‘the man who would strike the initial spark that started Nato’ and who took the ‘first faltering steps’ towards its ...”

“... singers, Cash clearly had some quality-control issues, but he also had a sense of humour; the one may indeed be the result of the other. The legendary album At Folsom Prison, for example, features him singing not only ‘Folsom Prison Blues’ and ‘Cocaine Blues’, but also the Jack Clement number ‘Flushed from the Bathroom of Your Heart’, which has ...”

“... was accepted mainly because it was so blindingly obvious to all save the most abject blimps. (They may have included some leading politicians – Churchill initially, and Ernest Bevin.) The disparity between Britain’s postwar situation and her colonial responsibilities was just too huge. Hyam spends some time debating ...”

“... innocent white slaves: they were the women the law deemed worth saving.When Detective Inspector Ernest Anderson brought Harvey into the Great Marlborough Street police station on 9 July 1910, it was clear that she was a promising victim, respectable enough to help bring the ‘ruffians’ to justice. She was young, Protestant, sexually inexperienced and ...”

“... the Declaration was plainly contradictory, with its promise that ‘nothing shall be done which may prejudice the civil and religious rights of existing non-Jewish communities in Palestine, or the rights and political status enjoyed by Jews in any other country.’ This had been carefully worded. ‘Civil and religious rights’ weren’t the same as ...”

“... issues. They agree that US quasi-imperial supremacy is a ‘bubble’, a semblance that may have overawed the globe during a period of disoriented transition, but never derived from American military or economic power alone. It depended on the absence or indifference of the US’s earlier foes, Russia and China, plus the collusion of its former ...”

“... are all possibilities. The only known reader of the new work is Salinger’s son, Matthew, but he may have been joined by Salinger’s widow, Colleen, and possibly by his literary agent and by a few editors at Little, Brown, the publisher of the original four books. Or maybe not; maybe at this stage it stops with the widow and the son, or even just the ...”

“... become ‘things’: the attempt to remove a terminological distinction between men and women may turn both into an object, as when ‘chairman’ and ‘chairwoman’ are replaced by ‘chair’. Such phenomena are part of the rough-and-tumble of linguistic change and a fair price to pay for legitimate social objectives. My concern is not with the fact ...”

“... it is not just another facet of reality, however clamorous and incorrigible that reality may sometimes feel. Miss Didion, however, has come out. She stands revealed, in The White Album, as a human being who has managed to gouge another book out of herself, rather than as a writer who gets her living done on the side, or between the lines. The result ...”

“... have consequences for domestic political struggles. During the Sepoy Mutiny, the Chartist leader Ernest Jones saw the Indian insurgents as a model for the revival of working-class politics in England. The Chartist movement, then in decline, could, he hoped, find new energy once the effects of ‘Indian mismanagement’ were ‘felt in our mines and ...”

“... for that project, Herzog stands beside Chatwin’s leather rucksack, the gift of a dying man. In May 2018, a group of 48 filmmakers were invited to join Herzog at a workshop where they would ‘submerge into the density and mystery of the Peruvian Amazonian jungle’. They would travel ‘exclusively in motorboat’. Jungle tourism caters for all tastes, as ...”

“... in ‘standing up to Communism’ was never uncritical, and could seldom be taken for granted. Ernest Bevin, as foreign secretary, could match the Americans in apocalyptic language, warning after the 1948 Communist takeover in Prague of ‘the collapse of organised society over great stretches of the globe’. But neither he nor Clement Attlee would have ...”

“... of her first husband, whom she met while working at a chemist’s in Dublin and married at 24 – Ernest Gébler, a petty legend and a loon for the ages. (‘He took a photograph of me with my long hair, standing by the hall door, somewhat self-consciously, and with pride sent it to his first wife.’) Petty legends play their part, however: he is as well ...”

“... Saint-Simonian beliefs about gender complementarity (although rather mystical) and celibacy may have shaped her adult distrust of heterosexual norms. Bonheur was also introduced by her father to the writings of Félicité de Lamennais, nicknamed ‘Robespierre in a surplice’, a radical Catholic democrat who was formally condemned by the ...”