“... Massacre of the Innocents, with its mother vainly trying to protect her son from one of King Herod’s soldiers, her mouth ‘torn open in a scream’.Bacon said little about his time in and around Paris, but it allowed him to learn the language and make useful connections. At the end of 1928 he moved to London, where he grew close to a number of ...”

“... Widmerpool, hinting at a newly gained standing in exalted circles, banks on the marriage of the king to Mrs Simpson, a sure sign this would be a bad thing. Powell had strong views about royal duty, as his opinion of dramatis personae sixty years later would show. En route to Los Angeles in 1937, he celebrated the coronation of George VI on board ship in the ...”

“... or the bad? ‘Her best-known writings were essentially inward-looking,’ the political theorist Margaret Canovan explained in 1992. ‘The motive behind her work was her own effort to understand … Misreadings of her books left her largely unmoved.’ For Canovan – who wrote two separate Arendt books eighteen years apart, with two quite different ...”

“... call on anything as formidable as the Metropolitan Police’s Territorial Support Group, the boy king refuses to step ashore. ‘Rough, rude men’ had been sent ‘all over the country’ to gather the iniquitous poll tax and the mood was ugly. Ackroyd mentions the incident, adding that the waters of Deptford ‘refreshed the rebellious followers of Wat ...”

“... and the City’s creator and its second lead writer were gay men, Darren Star and Michael Patrick King, prompting one of the Girls cast, Jemima Kirke, to say of Dunham’s series: ‘It’s not Sex and the City … That’s four gay men sitting around talking.’ Meanwhile Issa Rae, the Black creator of HBO’s Insecure (2016-21), defended Dunham against ...”

“... that a community whose ‘sons and brothers have had to face the hunnish foe in a foreign land for King and Country, should be so exploited by rapacious Steamer Companies’.Some of the complaints were reasonable, others less so. The island of Colonsay had nine sailings to and from the mainland every month, when the steamer called on its journey between ...”

“... kept flying back to the US.In September 1997, she performed pieces from her last novel, Pussy, King of the Pirates, with music from the Mekons at the Chicago Museum of Contemporary Art. During the final performance she collapsed. She got herself to San Francisco, where she booked a room in a Travelodge and phoned Glück, and then Viegener. A hospital ...”

“... about the homeless in the US. Ditto this one about Chernobyl. Ditto the one about (what else?) Margaret Thatcher. Those song ‘explanations’ are exactly the kind of thing you might have expected from someone not quite as smart as Bowie trying to do a Bowie: Bowie lite. Ironically, they gave the game away by being way too heavy. He could seem almost like ...”

“... more unsavoury amours and making clucking sounds of bourgeois disapproval, he incurred the ire of King Saul. Roth took Bellow’s side, because of course he did. ‘The writers I admired most in the world were conspiring against me,’ Atlas lamented, victim of a classic squeeze play. As a bonus indignity Roth inserted a nasty sideswipe at an Atlas-like ...”

“... in 1875, and known for his charisma, cunning and strategic skills, was dubbed ‘the uncrowned king of Ireland’. He was brought down in 1890, having been named by William O’Shea as co-respondent in a divorce action, and died the following year.) It didn’t even look as though Sinn Féin had captured the public imagination. In opening his tobacco shop ...”

“... affecting the climate or impoverishing us. But as a result of actions taken a generation ago by Margaret Thatcher’s Conservatives – a party whose nationalist programme promised independence from Europe – the decisions aren’t Britain’s alone. Thatcher promised less state involvement in industry but the future of Britain’s energy supply now hinges ...”

“... of the president, José Eduardo dos Santos, who assumed office in an age of strongmen, between Margaret Thatcher’s first election victory in 1979 and Robert Mugabe’s in 1980. Thirty-six years later Dos Santos is still in power. Under his supervision, Angola is not just a development star, but a model of elite self-enrichment and wealth disparity. There ...”

“... or a question of interpretation, or a misleading claim, but a lie. It ignores the rebate Margaret Thatcher negotiated. When you factor that in, the EU actually ‘takes’ about £250 million a week from Britain. Deepening the dishonesty of the original lie, even that figure overstates Britain’s contribution by more than half, because the EU gives ...”

“... Tom at the age of two and a half (now five, he has annual appointments at the Tavistock); Callum King decided she was Julia as soon as she could talk. In 2014, the mental health charity Pace surveyed 2000 young people who were questioning their gender: 48 per cent had attempted suicide and 58 per cent self-harmed. ‘They kill themselves,’ Julia’s mother ...”

“... have been better if he didn’t. One bit of learned advice to the British reader: if you hear Margaret Thatcher or her successor Big Benn speaking in the Commons on the state of the box-office in the West End, you’d better brace yourself because an English version of Dr Goebbels is surely limping his way down Whitehall – to take care of the Ministry ...”