“... in certain constituencies, such as the famous Basildon; and c. keen readers of the Sun. On the day of the 1992 general election the Sun ran a headline saying: ‘IF KINNOCK WINS TODAY, WILL THE LAST PERSON TO LEAVE BRITAIN TURN OUT THE LIGHTS.’ After the result it ran another headline saying: ‘IT’S THE SUN WOT WON IT.’ That was a joke, but from the ...”

“... though, in which Raffles, mercurial as ever, shrugs on, if only for the moment, the mantle of Robin Hood. In ‘A Jubilee Present’, Raffles offers his take on the gold cup which is to be presented to the nation to celebrate the queen’s Diamond Jubilee: ‘A number of the immorally rich clubbed together and presented it to the nation; and two of the ...”

“... land because of the difficult terrain and members of the unit got by on a bowl of boiled rice a day. ‘We fought with all the weapons we had,’ the major said. ‘Even the unit’s cook carried a gun and fought alongside the soldiers. But we were running out of ammunition. Thirteen men had been killed and more than a third were injured. We were becoming ...”

“... with the law; her push-back against the intransigence of police and politicians. And then, one day last year, I stumbled on this paragraph: ‘David Boyd, 54, of Chesterton Court, Stockton, Teesside, has been charged with the murder of Nikki Allan.’ And I knew I was going back to Wearside.I found it utterly changed: the infrastructure, the ...”

“... trial didn’t take place until June 1943. ‘For the moment I write all I can, awaiting the evil day of prosecution,’ he said in 1942. But as the trial approached, his attitude changed perceptibly. Writing to his friend the journalist David Ayerst, Tippett declared himself ‘very much at peace and ready to go’.On 21 August 1943, at 7.30 ...”

“... It is of course a picture of the rise of Christianity which has taken quite a beating recently. Robin Lane Fox has shown that early Christianity was really a very middle-class affair. Nietzsche dedicated Human All Too Human – admittedly in one of his spasmodic reactions against Schopenhauer – to Voltaire, saint of the Enlightenment. The connection ...”

“... us did, and even the women who bought one puffball for an evening weren’t going to change their day wear. So – fashion designers took huge losses, and department stores reeled, and some stores went out of business and some clothing operations in the US are still suffering from the results of the sulky determination of the late Eighties that fashion ...”

“... of Silvercup Studios,’ she said. ‘Instead, I just lay there knowing I had a job for another day and health insurance through the Screen Actors Guild.’ Years after the original series aired, the most prominent male member of the cast, Chris Noth, was accused by several women of sexual assault (accusations he denies).At least in its early seasons, Sex ...”

“... a shameful thing that had happened when she was a teenager – something she thought about every day, and was ashamed still to be thinking about, because she kept telling herself it had been nothing.In his testimony, Kavanaugh yelled at the Judiciary Committee that he had ‘busted his butt’ in high school to be the basketball captain, get into Yale, go to ...”

“... a pen-syringe to a Cuban contact in Paris, intended for use in assassinating Castro, on the very day in November 1963 that President Kennedy was shot. The Cubans were understandably careful with unannounced visitors bearing gifts. At the end of my trip, I was able to present Carlos Rafael with the rather sweaty Stilton, before we went on to discuss Cuba’s ...”

“... and her resolve held. Moore writes: As in a war, the picture could change dramatically each day, and on several fronts. A ‘Daily Coal Report’ was supplied to ministers and officials, listing statistics of tonnes produced, pits operating and miners working, injuries to police, legal actions proposed and so on. Downing Street staff studied these ...”

“... Trust, the charity that ran Park View and Nansen and Golden Hillock; it’s also true that on that day, he and all his fellow trustees resigned, in the hope that if they did so, the DfE would lift the threat it had made to pull the plug on the charity’s funding. If you want to read Alam’s very thoughtful and interesting 2007 booklet, you won’t find it on ...”

“... me now that I showed signs of developing into a fully fledged fuck-up. I remember the particular day and evening because I’d visited his doctor to be looked after for a venereal complaint, and he went along too to have a vitamin B12 injection, like JFK used to get. He had a cold and said he had a large evening planned, which, to my surprise, involved ...”

“... 1990s, when, as Aiden Campbell put it, the main industry that moved in after coal went was drugs. Day trippers and dog walkers come to the bright expanse of beach just down from the harbour mouth. It’s only half an hour by car or train from the southern edge of Blyth to the centre of Newcastle, and the town is becoming a satellite of the big city. ‘Most ...”

“... darken and blur. The Blurred Lines of Grigoriadis’s title is an allusion to a notorious song by Robin Thicke, in which he repeats the line ‘I know you want it’ at least six times. The song is also the basis of an essay by Roxane Gay; one of the reasons she calls herself a ‘bad’ feminist is that she finds herself wanting to sing along. Blurred Lines ...”