“... poems. The language here is less difficult and disrupted than in such pieces as Ping and Worst-ward Ho, where normal syntax and logical sequence are more or less dispensed with. In the new work a solitary figure who has sat hunched at a table, head on hands, for a long time sees himself stirring, one night, and going out of the room. The ‘outer ...”

“... to the demotic. So today at rehearsal I give a note. Though most of the patients in the geriatric ward are Northern in their tone and language, Ambrose, the retired schoolmaster (a part I could once have played), is determinedly abstruse, just as Valentine, the Asian doctor, can be quite technical in his language. Two of Valentine’s speeches come out of ...”

“... children’.In 2010, the disgraced (but still popular on the paid-lecture circuit) anti-vaxxer Andrew Wakefield visited the Somali community in Minnesota to expound his claims that the MMR vaccine causes autism in children. In the following years, vaccination rates in this group fell from more than 90 per cent to around 50 per cent. Researchers found that ...”

“... War in India: in three volumes he had taken the narrative only to the end of 1857. More recently, Andrew Ward’s moving account of the mutiny at Kanpur weighs in at nearly 700 pages; volumes by Christopher Hibbert and Saul David hover around 500.) Seen from certain perspectives, what had happened was a complete collapse of British security, authority ...”

“... the mere thought of liberated sex: Thursday, 26 September 1963: The Denning Report on the Profumo-Ward case is out. Apparently it says that well-known actors were at these filthy parties. It is a disgrace that such people should bring our profession into disrepute in this vile way. Thank the powers that my own private fantasies have been left to wrestle with ...”

“... like ‘He looked as if he would murder me and he did’ – was formulated in 1950 in a piece on Andrew Young, a Scottish-born nature poet and Anglican clergyman. The anti-humanist thinking that underpins Spark’s writing seems to have grown from a feeling that meliorative, rational-materialist enterprises were an inadequate answer to the problem of death ...”

“... and a man of great personal austerity. He was run over by a tram in 1926, and put in a public ward at the hospital because no one knew who he was. His architecture – the Palau Güell, the Parque Güell, the Casa Mila, the ill-fated and still unfinished Sagrada Familia – was, in Hughes’s terms, ‘the delayed baroque that Barcelona never ...”

“... as the names of William Johnston, William McGrath, Carl Schorske, Allan Janik, Stephen Toulmin, Andrew Whiteside and John Boyer testify.* There are a number of plausible reasons for this. The first and most obvious is the great diaspora of Central European scholars brought about by the rise of Nazism in the 1930s – though some intellectuals, like ...”

“... have been at the school during those years, and saw that his first friends could have been Paul Ward, Brian Foster and Terry Klepka.Many of our modern crimes are crimes of the imagination. We think of the unspeakable and exchange information on it. We commit a ‘thought-crime’ – giving the illicit or the abominable an audience. Some of us pretend to ...”

“... Southampton. Moses is travelling on the 46 bus from Westbourne Park to Waterloo to meet his latest ward, ‘vex with himself that his heart so soft that he always doing something for somebody and nobody ever doing anything for him’.Moses has begun to internalise the racism he has suffered. On the 46, when he ‘sit down and pay his fare he take out a white ...”

“... only a few. Yet almost at once there came rumblings from Cambridge. Maurice Cowling, John Vincent, Andrew Jones and others rightly emphasised the Victorian politician’s relative autonomy from popular pressure, and cleverly unveiled the feebleness of provincial and popular reformers when they tried to operate at Westminster or Whitehall. Since 1979 ...”

“... in an unknown hospital. The nurses’ hands, the vibrations caused by people walking around the ward, the pain of the sheets against his wounds are his only contact with the outside world. He is unable to separate the present from his hallucinations of the past: work and love in Los Angeles, his upbringing in Colorado. Trumbo cleverly writes the reader into ...”

“... visits to – and eventual prison break of – an elderly friend trapped and abused in a geriatric ward. Accounts such as these have, over the years, made a compelling argument for care as a site of fundamental questions about the limits of the welfare state. As Townsend put it, ‘the ultimate test of the quality of a free, democratic and prosperous society ...”

“... of state for health. The public inquiry was set up in 2010 by the then secretary of state, Andrew Lansley, to investigate further the findings of a previous inquiry, commissioned by the Labour health minister Andy Burnham and intended ‘primarily to give those most affected by poor care an opportunity to tell their stories’. Many such stories had ...”

“... flat in Battersea. It was crammed with people who’d been campaigning for Labour in the ward all day; there was a moment of silence and then quite a few people started crying.The Labour right’s perennial criticism of its factional opponents is that they aren’t interested in winning elections. This is obviously untrue. In 2017 Corbyn’s Labour ...”