“... signal he was instantly cut off by the control room. The irresponsible announcer in this case was David Tennant, who was also guilty of starting off John Duckworth on a poetry reading with instructions to keep going until Tennant returned, after which he forgot about him. ‘I am told,’ Matheson noted crisply, ‘that he went on until half past ...”

“... Scarborough as his prizes. But while ‘John Paul Jones won the propaganda war,’ the historian David Pendleton told me, ‘much of that is down to his famous line, which he almost certainly never said, and the fact he brought the war to British shores. The convoy was carrying a cargo essential to the British war efforts. The Serapis and the Countess of ...”

“... dissidents and sometimes collaborators, not survivors of labour and concentration camps. (David Nasaw’s The Last Million: Europe’s Displaced Persons from World War to Cold War, published in 2020, pays close attention to the way the distinctive character of Jewish suffering was effaced as American churches or charities began lobbying on behalf of ...”

“... masculine sceptic while Mulder is the feminine believer. (What a man! I would exclaim as I watched David Duchovny in his little swimsuit. What a man!) It is not in the riverine quality of her voice, banked by reeds, sometimes pierced low by waterbirds. It is not even in her partner’s reaction, his one liquid larger pupil, the soft hopeless hope that he turns ...”

“... unpaid sovereign debt, and the supply-chain financing tycoon Lex Greensill, who hired David Cameron to lobby the UK government for business and was later disgraced and bankrupted.The biggest Vision Fund bet was WeWork – essentially a real estate company that leased commercial buildings in big cities, fixed them up with communal ...”

“... party, both started out as ‘terrorists’. Begin was behind the 1946 bombing of the King David Hotel, which killed nearly a hundred civilians; Shamir planned the 1948 kidnapping and assassination of the UN representative Folke Bernadotte. Yitzhak Rabin, revered among liberal Zionists as a peacemaker, oversaw the deportation of tens of thousands of ...”

“... any memory of his existence’ and so changed her son’s name from James Donald Bowman to James David Hamel: ‘Hamel’ was the name of her next husband; she wanted to preserve the ‘J.D.’, but the Donald had to go. He’s only been known as ‘J.D. Vance’ – sometimes with dots, sometimes without – since 2014, when he changed his name to honour ...”

“... daydreams of its future as a world guru. In his later avatars as a Tory MP, a science minister in David Cameron’s cabinet, Baron Johnson of Marylebone, a fellow at Harvard’s Kennedy School and a dabbler in Adani’s honeypot, Johnson turned instead to describing how the ‘new India’ was ‘helping shape this young century’.Such U-turns occur ...”

“... hooligans: members of West Ham’s Inter City Firm launched the pirate radio station Centreforce FM). But Gillett complicates the story. He points out that dance music didn’t suddenly arrive in Britain in 1987; house, imported from Chicago a few years earlier, already had a following, particularly in Northern hotspots like Blackburn and Manchester. The ...”

“... word ‘worm’ for ‘word’, asks ‘one worm?’ His girlfriend – and Sasha’s ex-wife – Fi Kinebuchi, who plays the autoharp, lyre and guitar, quotes Krishnamurti on the danger of naming things: ‘When you teach a child that a bird is named “bird” that child will never see a bird again.’ Then the pianist, Simo Treen, adds #TonyInterruptor to ...”

“... up to be associated with it. Many of the military leaders of the First World War – Douglas Haig, David Beatty and Hamilton – were there, under the distant and autocratic leadership of Herbert Kitchener. The other great difference in 1898 was that there was no risk of repeating Gambier-Parry’s confusion of 1884. Every soldier and every newspaper reader ...”

“... might pass as an intellectual.The extravagant praise these men inspire can be a little creepy. David Foster Wallace described watching Federer as a ‘near-religious experience’, but even he couldn’t have anticipated the levels of idolatry in The Roger Federer Effect. The book brings together interviews with friends, fans and nodding acquaintances ...”

“... the scandals lifted in turn by Wills from sources such as Joan and Clay Blair’s The Search for J.F.K. To be sure, the bits are juicy: Joe Kennedy propositioning his sons’ girlfriends and introducing Gloria Swanson into his household as if she were a maiden aunt rather than his mistress; Arthur Krock, eminent pundit, first procuring girls for the Kennedy ...”

“... but out of a piece of inaccurate gossip. The Goldsmith case, though presented in the usual David-and-Goliath terms, in fact confirmed the established strength of the Eye: Goldsmith, who hadn’t been much in the public view since his elopement with Isabel Patino, ran headfirst into the magazine’s rare power to make its opponents first notorious, then ...”

“... Year of Living Dangerously.* Credit for the screen adaptation is given to Mr Koch, together with David Williamson and Peter Weir himself. Some faults in the film probably have to do with production difficulties – for instance, the fact that all the Malay characters speak Tagalog (all right for the Philippines, where the film was shot) instead of Bahasa ...”