“... issue the call to prayer. ‘Once you scrutinise you will always find something, however small it may be,’ the anonymous author of the Trojan Horse letter wrote. ‘By that time the damage is done.’ Michael Gove had already vented his views on sinister Islamic plots in 2006, in his book Celsius 7/7: ‘There are many Muslims across the globe, within ...”

“... to make paper flowers on the beach while he played roulette – an activity that, Rickey suggests, may have sparked Varda’s preference for ‘the artisanal over the mass-produced’. Varda was an obsessive self-archivist (with a particular love of postcards), yet Rickey does not seem to have had access to any personal correspondence, diaries or ...”

“... as a prominent member of the Hausa-Fulani aristocracy. Having been persuaded to spare him, Abacha may have felt that clemency for the Ogoni Nine would be interpreted as a sign of weakness by the military, the only group capable of deposing him. It was, in any case, a measure of Abacha’s growing confidence that he used the pretext of Yar’Adua’s ...”

“... girls who had skived off school to shout obscenities about Blair’s decision to go to war. In May 1978 it was the assembly point for the seven thousand Bangladeshis who marched behind Ali’s coffin to Downing Street. Young people in the area were beginning to distance themselves from their parents, whom they had come to see as passive. Their mothers were ...”

“... in the years immediately before the enclosure than in its aftermath, and that the labouring poor may have been ‘marginally better off’ as a result of enclosure. There were other changes. Festival days – Plough Monday, for example – were abolished by those whom Clare termed the ‘vulgar tyrants of the soil’. Enclosure also infringed the right to ...”

“... vital energy of seeming more plausible than the truth. And that is our world. Conspiracy nowadays may be as fleet as thought, and theories of fiction gather around every true event. ‘Theories that Trump had engineered the shooting himself for votes,’ Fiona Hamilton wrote in the Times,or the opposite narrative that it had been carried out by the ‘deep ...”

“... behind her teeth. ‘How could I go onstage with braces and two large gaps in my mouth?’There may also have been a desire to adopt a different persona: confident, sexy, untroubled by mysterious ailments or an overbearing mother. She ‘didn’t like reality’; acting ‘was a way to escape myself and live in someone else’s world’. At fifteen, she ...”

“... refuser (1853). Perhaps the two portrayals are not coincidental. In 1851, the Melville family read David Copperfield aloud as their evening entertainment. The pre-20th-century office worker saw himself as a cut above the unsalaried labouring masses, and was as ambivalent about his superiors, who were his only means of rising, as the rest of the working world ...”

“... the Syrian army when it came under threat from IS. When IS forces laid siege to Palmyra last May and drove Assad’s army out after a week-long battle, not a single American plane was seen. Similar selectiveness was exercised in Hasakah a month later, as I was told by a local YPG commander. The city is divided between a largely Arab district, where the ...”

“... Don’t mind if I do! But all this was still no substitute for live sport at the weekend. It may be that the featurelessness of lockdown time put more pressure on this weak spot or spot in the week. If the days are hard to tell apart, you’re more likely to feel the absence of something that used to differentiate week and weekend. But this can’t fully ...”

“... writing and filmmaking (in 1938 he had won an Oscar for The Private Life of the Gannets). In 1951 David Attenborough’s first TV production was narrated by Huxley.An early fascination with Africa (and a lifelong love of travel) slowly developed into one of the two dominating preoccupations of his final decades, the preservation of African wildlife, where his ...”

“... expound her work through her own body: eternally ‘an athlete of God’, as she herself says; a David before the Ark. Graham’s own book, finished just before she died and burdened with a reluctant acceptance of mortality in its last pages, nevertheless begins briskly: ‘I am a dancer.’ She knew she still was, although she gave her last performance in ...”

“... for the new constitutional plans for South Africa with the gloomy conclusion that the conflict ‘may beexpected to tend gradually towards anarchy, in which the quality of life for everyone, black and white, wouldbe destroyed’. In such an event, he asks himself, would there be any relevance in the fact that Transkei was independent? Answer: scarcely ...”

“... Stuart Montgomery, the publisher of Gunslinger (and of Robert Duncan, Gary Snyder, Basil Bunting, David Jones and Roy Fisher), a wispy-moustached medical man with a significant hobby, decided to do something about the sluggishness and indolence of mainstream critics. He flew off to Las Vegas and took a cab to the hotel where Howard Hughes was rumoured to be ...”

“... those photographs now and am struck by how many of the women present were wearing Chanel suits and David Webb bracelets’), one mood from another. The bassinette was a turning point: ‘Until the bassinette it had all seemed casual, even blithe, not different in spirit from the Jax jerseys and printed cotton Lilly Pulitzer shifts we were all wearing that ...”