“... Ladd-Taylor and Umansky – wrote into law many of the recommendations made by Charles Murray and Richard Herrnstein in their book The Bell Curve, in which they charged that single motherhood correlates positively with child poverty and crime, and urged that welfare benefits be taken away as a disincentive to further childbearing. ‘While more affluent women ...”

“... committee to examine NHS expenditure: the crucial brief was written by two young welfare radicals, Richard Titmuss and Brian Abel-Smith. He also set up the first committee to investigate the effects of smoking: both the Treasury and Lord Salisbury wanted to suppress its Report and Macleod, anxious to placate such powerful colleagues, chain-smoked his way ...”

“... degree of detail unprecedented for a composer since Cosima Wagner’s diaries gave us a quotidian Richard. Stravinsky may well have reckoned on this in forging the intimate relationship (‘dearest Bobsky’) with Craft but he cannot have known just how acute and gifted an observer he would prove, how naturally sensitive a Stravinskologist. In describing the ...”

“... loved, likewise Trainspotting. Almost anything scatological had great appeal. He also enjoyed the Richard Yates books I shared with him. When I was ill at one point I read through all of Derek Raymond, whom I recommend to anyone with a stubborn bacterial infection. ‘Oh, yes,’ Thom said, ‘he’s wonderful, isn’t he.’ Sometimes we came on an author ...”

“... we hear the first chords of Bill Haley and the Comets. We find, too, the trenchant comments of Richard Hoggart, A.H. Halsey, Anthony Sampson and Michael Young – the Four Evangelists of the 1950s to whom Hennessy dedicates his book. Their increasingly grumpy pronouncements on the ‘shiny barbarism of the new affluence’ pepper the pages of Having It So ...”

“... matter as hopeless’. He disliked speaking about his background because, as he said (working a nice line in parodic lordliness), ‘one has so little pleasure in reciting the anecdotes of beggary.’ One childhood pleasure was rummaging among the books in his father’s shop. The hodge-podge of works he found there, from arcane philosophy to popular ...”

“... actual “failure”.’ A lively, charming young man in Ireland (‘Oh, he is a foine eater and a nice drinker,’ an acquaintance reportedly said, delimiting his talents), Willie seems to have inherited from his father, the surgeon Sir William Wilde, a shaky financial and moral sense (as did Oscar). There is a story, repeated by Sturgis, that Sir William, a ...”

“... Ford and Brett Kavanaugh. Dr Ford, appearing in public for the first time, turns out to be the nice next-door neighbour, but one who is also a psychology professor, able to speak of memories registering in the hippocampus. Her high-pitched adolescent voice and habit of flicking back strands of hair is at first disconcerting, but becomes wrenching as she ...”

“... asked the question never expressed better than by Angela Carter in the LRB in 1980: ‘Why is a nice girl like Simone wasting her time sucking up to a boring old fart like J-P?’At the end of the first year of the Sartre-Beauvoir pact – marked by that first experience of jealousy, which she dispelled by walking up and down the Butte Montmartre ...”

“... outgrew. And mostly a straight men’s club at that, if the patronising reference to ‘that nice faggot John Ashbery’ is any indication.) For such an aspirer at such a time, with the entire world engulfed in war, beautiful miniatures – glass menageries – were out of the question: life was to be absorbed in great gobs and gulps in lusty pursuit of ...”

“... exporting of equipment, technologies of torture and bad lieutenants. To take one instance, Richard Zuley, a specialist at Guantánamo, had become reassuringly ruthless while working for a Chicago police unit that for decades interrogated predominantly African-Americans at so-called black sites. It’s only now, with a white supremacist ensconced in the ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... things happen? Is it because the people who feel strongly about climate change are simply too nice, too educated, to do anything of the sort? (But terrorists are often highly educated.) Or is it that even the people who feel most strongly about climate change on some level can’t quite bring themselves to believe in it? I don’t think I can be the only ...”

“... deepened, the face was captured by some remarkable photographers, including Cecil Beaton, Richard Avedon and Jane Bown, and a string of artists. The vigorous scribble of Feliks Topolski naturally found him a good subject, as did the heroic sculptural instincts of Henry Moore, who drew Auden’s skin from memory on hearing of his death – ‘the ...”

“... a yawn.’ More equality is a good thing and it’s an idea that’s worth defending. It would be nice if there were more politicians willing to stand up and defend it, however they saw fit. That may be wishful thinking. But so too is the idea of an evidence-based politics, which just opens the door to all the prevarications of joined-up ...”