“... community needed to be ‘100 per cent happy’ with the content, but in the same message to John Scarlett, the head of the Joint Intelligence Committee, he made clear that ‘the judgment as to whether a single person should be appointed to write the final version’ had yet to be made.20 On his best behaviour, Scarlett made a final seizure of control ...”

“... wiretap of Trump. Again, the point was technically true. But the apparent honesty of the assurance took advantage of a careless anachronism in Trump’s language: wiretaps ordered on individuals belong to the espionage of fifty years ago. Obama, of course, didn’t order a wiretap of Trump by name, but the Trump campaign, including Trump Tower facilities, was ...”

“... and that to encourage urination – and hence to lessen the danger of kidney stones – one took a spoonful of ‘ginger jam’ before dinner. Some of the advice is common sense – what would today come under the rubric of ‘healthy lifestyle’ – though a ‘prayer to stop the flow of blood’ might prove unhelpful in an emergency. There is ...”

“... Act of 1832 and the third of 1884, British Liberal governments sought to extend state power, but took care to reassure property-owners that the aim was not to undermine them but to strengthen social stability, through national policing and prison reform, state education and increased powers over poor relief and drunkenness.Many books have tried to get to ...”

“... by the Tory life peer Dido Harding, herself a former McKinsey consultant. Harding’s husband, John Penrose, another former McKinsey consultant and a Tory MP, was at the time the ‘anti-corruption champion’ at the Home Office. During the pandemic, he hit the headlines for trying to absolve Owen Paterson, a fellow Tory MP, who had improperly lobbied on ...”

“... the interests and weaknesses of others. In Lucina’s Rape, Rochester’s adaptation of John Fletcher’s tragedy Valentinian (c.1610-14), Marcellina, a lady in waiting, shows her worldliness by parroting typical male arguments against women’s chastity: ‘This Honour is the veriest Mountebanke … what a cheate must that bee/Which robbs our lives ...”

“... may prefer Marguerite Porete, burning alive with her book, or the rich black intersection of St John of the Cross or the pyroclastic whisper of Anonymous, Unknown Author. Or something a little closer to home – Jeannie, for instance, the family friend whom my father (a Catholic priest in full cassock) calls simply a Eucharistic mystic, so guilelessly, and ...”

“... wasn’t the only reason: Emecheta’s prose isn’t polished and her plots can be jerky.) She took a job as a social worker and continued to write, eventually showing Second-Class Citizen to Elizabeth Stevens of Curtis Brown, who had the good idea of sending it to Allison and Busby, run by Margaret Busby, the UK’s first Black woman publisher. ‘Here ...”

“... while being reproached by more decisive, or more outraged, comrades such as Edward Thompson and John Saville, who left to establish an independent journal. But in the spring of 1957 he accepted the inevitable and left the party.It can be hard now to recover what a volcanic existential crisis this was for those, like Hill, whose lives had for so long been ...”

“... in a recent essay in the Times, Douglas Murray, a director of Toby Young’s Free Speech Union, took as a sign of our putative crisis over free speech the difficulty someone who opposes a net zero emissions goal has in becoming a university vice chancellor. As Lord Wallace of Saltaire remarked in the Lords debate on the higher education legislation last ...”

“... and then became disillusioned with it – W.B. Yeats and T.S. Eliot, for example – took refuge in an artistic flight from reality. Stuart’s work, after the war, became more real. He moved towards, not away from, the terrain of his shame. Other commentators, including Conor Cruise O’Brien, took the ...”

“... 251 days (between 2 March and 7 November) for Covid to claim its first 50,000 lives in the UK; it took 79 days to claim the next 50,000 (between 8 November and 25 January).Both Johnson and his government survived the pandemic, even emerging with some credit after a successful vaccine roll-out. Slowly, normality returned to everyday life, but the behaviour of ...”

“... ships, heaving seas, the swivelling turrets of six-inch guns; our island’s story, often with John Mills. And yet, for all its links with history, its invocation of Drake and Nelson, the grip of the Royal Navy on the popular imagination of Britain is relatively recent, dating from what Peter Padfield refers to as the country’s ‘Navalist ...”

“... books concentrate fiercely, and indeed lovingly, on just two households, that of the Reverend John Ames, and his lifelong friend the Reverend Robert Boughton, with flashbacks in Lila into the eponymous heroine’s life before she came to Gilead and married Ames and had a son with him. Gilead takes a strand from Middlemarch and turns it around. Ames, like ...”

“... escapades or of other people’s bad behaviour, a favourite being how, after a performance in John Osborne’s A Patriot for Me at Chichester for which he had been much praised, Alan was sitting in his dressing-room when there was a tentative knock on the door. It was Alec Guinness. He shook Alan’s hand, said, ‘You must be very tired,’ and ...”