“... did? When the Licensing Act wasn’t renewed in 1695, pre-publication censorship was replaced by post-publication scrutiny and prosecution under the common law of libel. As far as successive governments during the long 18th century were concerned, whether or not a publication was classed as seditious had as much to do with its medium as its message, with its ...”

“... cent. Obviously, this lasted only as long as the Empire did. The last director general with even post-colonial experience was Stella Rimington, who was talent-spotted in (independent) India, where her husband worked at the British High Commission. When this source dried up it caused recruitment problems. While it still operated, however, its bearing on the ...”

“... the long novel is an ocean with tides, capable of wearing down a thousand sharp edges. A book like Jonathan Littell’s The Kindly Ones can safely include an episode after a few hundred pages that has nothing in common with what surrounds it. An old man, claiming to be over 120, comes to see the Nazi narrator, effectively offering himself up for extermination ...”

“... that the vision is itself disseminated and dispersed. The weight of allusion is so great that Jonathan Culler remarks, in Structuralism and Since, that Dissemination is ‘Derrida’s most forbidding and difficult book’.If the reader is familiar with Derrida’s earlier work, though, there are enough cues in Dissemination to see what is going ...”

“... to live without her? Yet the carte postale of Duse might seem even more cherishable. Despite her Post-Modern household location – propped up like a jokey little icon next to the Body Shop bottles on the bathroom shelf – Duse exudes, well, a certain sublimity. She’s all in black, in some kind of elegant, judicial-looking, Portia-like robe, and leans ...”

“... things like anti-semitism or fear of Freemasons, which belong more properly to the world of post-Salem paranoia and have been ably dealt with by Professor Richard Hofstadter in his study The Paranoid Style in American Politics, then modern American conspiracy theory begins with the Warren Commission. There had been toxic political speculation at high ...”

“... potatoes by the score.’ (This lovelorn plea also features a treated oboe solo.) Eno’s post-Roxy lyrics have a similarly English flavour: ‘Ooh what to do, not a sausage to do!’ From a distance, Bryan and Brian may have looked worlds apart, but their work is laid out like two discrete English gardens: buttercups and daisies, sunsets and ...”

“... began​ with a walk-in. In August 2010 a former senior Pakistani intelligence officer approached Jonathan Bank, then the CIA’s station chief at the US embassy in Islamabad. He offered to tell the CIA where to find bin Laden in return for the reward that Washington had offered in 2001. Walk-ins are assumed by the CIA to be unreliable, and the response from ...”

“... Brick, has vanished into the vault, as have Noah Baumbach’s unfinished pilot for a TV version of Jonathan Franzen’s The Corrections, starring Ewan McGregor, Maggie Gyllenhaal and Greta Gerwig, a Ridley Scott-directed pilot for a rejected show called The Vatican, and many others.After Chase shot the pilot for The Sopranos, ten months went by before HBO got ...”

“... its medical industries. The US has provided some of the WHO’s most dynamic figures, notably Jonathan Mann, who led the organisation’s response to the spread of Aids in the 1980s. In narrative fiction and non-fiction, a stock figure has emerged: the brave, principled, maverick American researcher who leaves the safety of the homeland to plunge into the ...”

“... the most touching and tender moments in these works, something it is awkward to point out in our post-Freudian age. The aristocratic Almanach-de-Gotha family lines form a web that transects the whole of the Wehrmacht; their mirror-image is the party network that resists, subtends and extends far beyond them.Bora’s psychology is, however, another matter, as ...”

“... Whisper’) and shopped it around to record labels, but ‘Wham Rap!’s message clashed with the post-Falklands mood of triumphant Thatcherite aspiration.Only Innervision, a start-up label backed by CBS Records, would take a chance on Wham! (the name of the label evokes Stevie Wonder’s 1973 album). It was good timing: Michael’s father – never an ...”

“... from Guatemala to Hungary, Serbia to Switzerland. One act has branched out into its own ‘post-break up’ solo Beatle tribute acts; another, from Brazil, is set to open its own Cavern Club in São Paolo. Beatles tourism belongs to the post-1990s world of arts-led ‘regeneration’ and site-specific ...”

“... for out-of-body bliss. Can I carry off the decadence of it? With all those memories of rusty post-industrial rivulets, municipal chlorine tanks, filled-in lidos of a lifetime stretching back through the polio-defying 1950s to coal-dusted Bristol Channel beaches still being cleared of barbed wire and mines. There is no resistance in the Shangri-La ...”

“... to do with actual genealogical practice. Norman Rockwell’s 1959 cover for the Saturday Evening Post, Family Tree, has at the top of the tree an impeccably white baby – not surprising – one far whiter than might be expected from the swarthy and often disreputable ancestry sprouting up from the roots: at the bottom, a pirate is matched with a Spanish ...”