“... dying horses and abandoned children. In The Element of Crime (1984), a ravaged cop called Fisher (Michael Elphick) struggles through a flooded landscape, trying to solve a crime. Fisher is a particularly bad detective: he has an affair with a prostitute who turns out to have been the lover of the murderer he is trying to find, then he accidentally murders the ...”

“... TV show Ready Steady Go!, and appeared in other films as well as Russell’s, including Alfie with Michael Caine. How much of her reputation came from her art and how much from herself is a question that haunts Kristal’s book as well as Pauline Boty: A Portrait, the catalogue for an exhibition of her work at Gazelli Art House earlier this year. Both have ...”

“... insight into how Labour thinks and works’. The former home secretary Jacqui Smith was a specialist partner at the firm until last month, when Starmer appointed her to the Lords and made her an education minister.At the party conference last year, Starmer told a ‘business forum’ of more than two hundred executives and lobbyists that ...”

“... and writing, began to hang out together. In the summer of 1964, Jacqueline and their son Michael went to Long Island while Brian stayed in New York working on The Emperor of Ice-Cream. Frank Russell, who had won a Guggenheim for his nature writing, also left New York. Brian and Jean became lovers that summer, and not long afterwards Jacqueline and ...”

“... partly because of the commotion caused by the change of national leadership, the passing of Michael Oakeshott did not attract much public notice. Even the Spectator, which might have been expected to mark the event with a full salute, ignored it for half a year, before carrying a curiously distracted piece by its editor, reporting strange losses in the ...”

“... into sanctions against Pretoria – which in itself was enough to ensure that action against Smith’s UDI regime would be merely cosmetic. Since all Smith had to do was to keep saying no to any solution acceptable to Commonwealth and world opinion, Wilson’s efforts at personal diplomacy were palpably ...”

“... Riesman. A parade of unreliable associates – including a memorabilia mogul who claimed to be Michael Jackson’s best friend – tried to persuade him they’d found a way to turn his celebrity into cash. Collaborations with Whoopi Goldberg and RZA from the Wu-Tang Clan were mooted but didn’t happen. (‘If they’re popular with young people,’ Lee ...”

“... or investigators (even rarer), is spared. ‘We will do as we are told,’ the writer Ali Smith thinks to herself as she makes her way through the four security checks on the way to the cell of the detainee she has been given permission to meet. When one trafficked woman refused to respond under questioning, her failure to do so was treated as ...”

“... frequent characterisation as a ‘saint’; understandably, it doesn’t cite his LSE colleague Michael Oakeshott’s description of him as ‘a snake in saint’s clothing’. But his reputation has remained tinged with an almost religious aura. Even his daughter recognises why he might have been described as ‘an ascetic divine’, who ‘with his lean ...”

“... vote. They did this in part by adapting the language of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights. Michael Heilperin, a founding member of Mont Pelerin, wrote the ICC’s International Code to Protect Foreign Investments, which enshrined the ‘preferential’ standing of foreign investors over the host state. Neoliberals, in other words, deftly promoted the ...”

“... for example, to the seductions of the form of conservatism promoted by his LSE colleague Michael Oakeshott, observing tartly that ‘tradition may be elegance, competence, courage, modesty and realism … it is also bullshit, servility, vested interest, arbitrariness, empty ritual.’ Gellner didn’t do ideological enthusiasm, but he was at the same ...”

“... scholarly assessment’. It was about a year and a half before the speculation was scotched. Michael Durey, writing in the TLS, proved that ‘Mr Wordsworth’ was in fact the poet’s cousin Robinson Wordsworth, collector of customs at Harwich, who was being paid for expenses incurred in arresting and taking to London two men accused of treason. He also ...”

“... shillings and sixpence. Each purchaser from Browning’s stall – or from that of his publishers, Smith, Elder – was therefore paying thirty shillings, or 360 pence, i.e. 45 times the price of the original. Like a canny Victorian merchant, Browning picked up his raw material cheap abroad, manufactured it into fancy goods, and sold it at a premium in his ...”

“... for clemency awaited his decision. Among the applicants, it is reported, were Conrad Black; Michael Milken, of junk bond fame; John Walker Lindh, the ‘American Taliban’; a former Republican congressman jailed for accepting bribes; and a former Democratic governor of Louisiana, convicted on racketeering charges. They were doomed to ...”

“... shouting across to one another from their uncurtained cubicles. Coming in this afternoon Maggie Smith said: ‘Oh God. It’s like a women’s prison.’ She didn’t mean just any women’s prison but the penitentiary that used to stand on the corner of Greenwich and Sixth Avenues in New York. Relations of the inmates used to gather on the sidewalk to ...”