“... on being recalled to London to be told that the foreign secretary, Jack Straw, and Sir Richard Dearlove, the head of MI6, had decided that in the ‘War on Terror’ we should, as a matter of policy, use intelligence obtained through torture by foreign intelligence services. A follow-up memo from a Foreign Office legal adviser in March 2003 ...”

“... than with a woman’. By early November, about the time Kennedy was squeaking out a victory over Richard Nixon, Ann became pregnant. She was still a few weeks shy of her 18th birthday. They were secretly married on 2 February 1961 in Maui, but it is unclear how long they actually lived together. Scott reports that Ann’s friends suspected she knew early on ...”

“... a Mod, a hippy and a Buddhist; he’d called himself Davie Jones, David Jay and David Bowie (after Richard Widmark’s portrayal of Jim Bowie in The Alamo, though he pronounces it the southern English way, the first syllable rhyming with ‘snow’ rather than ‘shoe’ or ‘cow’). Whatever it took. One of the things Trynka’s biography makes clear is ...”

“... state of Massachusetts. But by late August Kennedy was dead. An unknown Republican, Scott Brown, won Kennedy’s old seat and Obama’s congressional buffer was gone, never to return. Kennedy’s death, and its consequences, speak to a version of American politics very different from the one conjured by Obama’s campaign speeches: the hard facts of ...”

“... down the trumpet ‘just like you’re spitting paper pellets at the school bully’. One morning, Richard Lloyd, the cathedral organist, a man who like my father never got angry, auditioned me at his grand piano and offered me a place in the cathedral choir. I was ten years old. Despite the name, most of the boys at the Chorister School weren’t ...”

“... is a necessary evil,’ Stephen Dedalus says in Ulysses. In Yeats: The Man and the Masks, Richard Ellmann quoted Ivan Karamazov: ‘Who doesn’t desire his father’s death?’ ‘From the Urals to Donegal,’ Ellmann writes,the theme recurs, in Turgenev, in Samuel Butler, in Gosse. It is especially prominent in Ireland. George Moore, in his ...”

“... Archaeological Museum says. The couple were illustrious knights of the royal chamber of Richard II, Sir William Neville and Sir John Clanvowe, ‘the Castor and Pollux of the Lollard movement’, as the medieval historian Bruce McFarlane called them. Neville died just four days after Clanvowe, the inscription records, in October 1391. The ...”

“... hair: ‘fairly long, covered the ears, straight hair’. He added: ‘It was very light brown in colour. After he had been running it was messed and fell to the sides of the man’s face.’ No description of the facial features was given to the policeman. Brooks said that he was not sure that he could identify the man again. Afterwards, Brooks saw ...”

“... he would ‘like to meet soon. There is much I would like to talk about, with you.’ When Gordon Brown became prime minister in 2007, he invited Thatcher to Downing Street and greeted her warmly at the front door. By this point her health was poor and some criticised Brown’s gesture as exploitative of a sick old ...”

“... Dennis Potter’s sexually provocative and formally challenging Singing Detective (1986) and Richard Eyre’s film of Charles Wood’s anti-Falklands Tumbledown (1988). When a newly aggressive ITV, freed from its franchise limitations by the 1990 Act, decided to make popular drama its flagship audience puller, BBC drama was faced with an unprecedented ...”

“... many of them privatised – are what I see. On the far side of Roman Road are the barracks-style brown brick walkways of the Greenways estate, built in the 1950s, solid and unremarkable, renovated not long ago, providing homes for hundreds; beyond them, its crown poking up beyond the Greenways roof, is Denys Lasdun’s listed Sulkin House, built on the site ...”

“... can be unnerving at the best of times. I have a picture in one of my books of Mahler and Richard Strauss stepping out into bright sunlight after a matinée of Salomé in Graz in 1906. The Old World sun glinting off the side of Mahler’s polished shoe, the sharp edge of Strauss’s boater, the geometric shadows thrown onto the wall behind them: these ...”

“... there by Laurence Olivier in Macbeth and, at the Golders Green Hippodrome, by John Gielgud in Richard II. I was also taken to things picked out by myself: the Crazy Gang in OK for Sound at the London Palladium and Eliot’s Murder in the Cathedral, after I had heard part of a broadcast of it. I found it long, apart from the murderers’ apologias, but was ...”

“... arms tied tightly behind their backs. The ones I saw were being guarded, not by Americans, but by brown-skinned ARVN soldiers, men of their own size and race, incongruous in alien boots and uniforms. From one of these groups an American officer, recognising me as a correspondent (I had a camera, a bush hat and carried no weapon), introduced himself as an ...”

“... football pitches, changing rooms erected to replace shower blocks opened in the dark ages by Wendy Richard of EastEnders. Back in the 1820s Gas Company funds were misappropriated, illegal payments made to council officials and stock accounts falsified. Now, in more enlightened times, when bureaucratic malpractice is exposed and celebrated every ...”