“... belated reaction to mass killings in Bosnia, where she worked in the early 1990s as a young freelance reporter. She was understandably appalled by what happened after the carnage began in 1992: ‘Despite unprecedented public outcry about foreign brutality, for the next three and a half years the United States, Europe and the United Nations stood ...”

“... thanked me a thousand times’). Then there is the splendid book edited by Richard van Emden and Stephen Chambers, which consists mainly of soldiers’ and sailors’ letters and diaries, British, Anzac and Turkish – no French or Indian, apart from a couple of Indian officers in the British army – arranged chronologically, with an editorial commentary ...”

“... a ramshackle household in St John’s Wood. Elizabeth Jane Howard, who knew them all when she was young and later wove them into her Cazalet novels, described the Craxtons as exuding happiness like pollen, which rubbed off. The pianist Harold Isaacs remembered overcrowded Acomb Lodge as ‘a very strange house’, adding enigmatically: ‘Essie knitted ...”

“... sociologist thinks that tells us anything about mobility, though some economists do. Among them is Stephen Machin, whose Social Mobility and Its Enemies (co-authored with Lee Elliot Major) likens absolute social mobility to a caravan progressing across a desert. But that’s confusing: higher levels of social mobility may be a means to faster growth, but ...”

“... the ordinary citizen’s contact with the police. The second was an intensive study of a group of young blacks whose attitudes were governed by the belief that they were under threat from the institutions of a predominantly white society. Third came a survey of 1770 police officers up to inspector rank, illustrating the deployment and activity of London ...”

“... chair, riddled with bullets; the other was kneeling, shot through the head. They were Derrick Moo Young, aged 53, and his son Duane Moo Young, 23, businessmen from Jamaica who had looked after properties in Fort Lauderdale owned by the man who would be accused of killing them, Krishna Maharaj, a Trinidadian national and ...”

“... a photograph in Harper’s Bazaar and mentioned it to Howard. The image was of a smartly dressed young woman standing outside the door to a blood bank – it had a slightly vampiric quality. This was the start of what would be called ‘the Look’. The young woman was Betty Joan Perske, born in the Bronx in September ...”

“... November 2018 when I got a message telling me that a 16-year-old boy had killed himself in Polmont Young Offender Institution, which lies between Glasgow and Edinburgh. My contact had seen a newspaper column I’d written about the suicide a few months earlier of another prisoner at Polmont, a young woman called Katie ...”

“... If​ you are British and no longer young, the title for a brand new Philip Larkin poem is liable to enter your head at least once a day. This morning it was ‘Order of Service’. It’s not as good as ‘High Windows’ or ‘Dockery and Son’, but it has the same doleful ebb. Searching in an old folder, I found an order of service for Larkin’s memorial at Westminster Abbey on 14 February 1986 ...”

“... comes up everywhere in his fiction. One of his short stories, ‘The Darling’, is about a pretty young thing whom no man can resist. Her father is one such and has his incestuous brains splattered over the kitchen table with his own Walther-P38 (it ‘virtually ruined the checkered tablecloth’, the narrative primly notes). Dolores then goes upstate to San ...”

“... begins. New York. K. wants to make a seafood salad, so we go into a fishmonger’s on Bleeker. A young, fat guy sits by the door, an old grey one at the back and, doing all the work, a Puerto Rican. K.: I want a dozen mussels. Fat Guy: We don’t sell them by the dozen. K.: How do you sell them? Fat Guy: Sell them by the pound. K.: OK. A pound. (Pause.) How ...”

“... he knows nothing about using them, so depends on the experience of his one significant recruit, a young army officer; he needs transport, but he has never learnt to drive. Worse yet is that he knows nothing at all about the very people he trusts are going to be his following, the Indians, the textbook proletariat. He is a city boy, but to get his Indians he ...”

“... borrows characters and plot elements from A Midsummer Night’s Dream, but owes just as much to Stephen King and Armistead Maupin, whose Tales of the City series informs some of its more melodramatic aspects. Three heartbroken San Franciscans (‘mortals,’ in the parlance of the novel) on their way to a party on Midsummer’s Night make the fateful ...”

“... for granted elsewhere. They order these things somewhat better in the Council of Europe, where Stephen Mennell, a disciple of Norbert Elias, began work on All Manners of Food. The slow-baked book that has finally emerged reads like a series of essays on pertinent food topics in cultural history rather than a comprehensive account of what has been ...”

“... to obtain their statements, just as they had to secure the confession of one of the Cardiff Three, Stephen Miller.Even when police officers are successfully prosecuted, the convictions they were involved in often remain unexamined. Since 2018 the Court of Appeal has quashed convictions in a string of cases involving Detective Sergeant Derek Ridgewell of the ...”