“... of Israel sprang. ‘The more rational, but more exhausted – the thinner-blooded – Jews of the West’ (included here are German and Danubian lands) were ‘not the stuff from which a new society could be moulded overnight. If the Jews of Russia had not existed, neither the case for, nor the possibility of realising, Zionism could have arisen in any ...”

“... or Irishness, he loved the Irish landscape. In 1932 he wrote to McGreevy about a trip to the west of Ireland with his brother Frank, describing Galway as a grand little magic grey town full of sensitive stone and bridges and water. We … spent a day walking on Achill right out over the Atlantic … Altogether it was an unforgettable trip and much too ...”

“... was man-made. Almost half think it may have been deliberately engineered by China against ‘the West’. Between a fifth and a quarter are ready to blame Jews, Muslims or Bill Gates, or to give credence to the idea that ‘the elite have created the virus in order to establish a one-world government’; 21 per cent believe – a little, moderately, a lot or ...”

“... deepest longing was for some unattainable separation of body and mind, and perhaps this is why, as Anthony Hecht pointed out, ‘there are probably more abstract nouns and adjectives’ in Schwartz’s work than in ‘any other modern writer’.‘The Heavy Bear Who Goes with Me’ is a comic meditation on the burden of physicality and ‘the scrimmage of ...”

“... with Mark Frost, an experienced screenwriter with whom Lynch had originally planned to adapt Anthony Summers’s Goddess: The Secret Lives of Marilyn Monroe. The usual line is that Frost contributed the more prosaic beats of the police procedural and soap opera – which is hard to dispute when what we know of their writing process is that Lynch lay on a ...”

“... But the mistake lay in the expectation.Douglas hired Kubrick again three years later to replace Anthony Mann as the director of Spartacus. This was a risky opportunity; but in 1960 success with a Roman epic could be trusted to make a director’s commercial reputation. An iron law of the genre was that Jesus must be in the movie somewhere. Spartacus dodged ...”

“... and moved with him to Bristol in 1961. She applied for jobs with the Bristol Evening Post and BBC West but didn’t get them. Then she signed on with the Labour Exchange and started writing what her father, she claimed, always referred to as her ‘dirty books’. There’s​ an amazing bit in Carter’s first fashion essay, ‘Notes towards a Theory of ...”

“... to six British soldiers: Nigel Coupe of the Duke of Lancaster’s Regiment, and Jake Hartley, Anthony Frampton, Christopher Kershaw, Daniel Wade and Daniel Wilford of the Yorkshire Regiment. All except Coupe, a sergeant and father of two children, were aged between 19 and 21. They died in Afghanistan in March 2012, out on patrol in Helmand province, when ...”

“... Trump’s business has been dependent almost from the start on real-life racketeers. There was Anthony ‘Fat Tony’ Salerno, boss of the Genovese crime family, and Paul ‘Big Paulie’ Castellano, boss of the Gambino crime family, who owned the company that provided the ready-mix cement for Trump Tower, used in place of the usual steel girders. There ...”

“... the page. So in due course Her Majesty went to Wales and to Scotland and to Lancashire and the West Country in that unremitting round of nationwide perambulation that is the lot of the monarch. The Queen must meet her people, however awkward and tongue-tied such meetings might turn out to be. Though it was here that her staff could help. To get round the ...”