“... is intentional, with a tension explicitly set up early on as to when, if ever, Hal and Gately will hook up. This projected meeting will, we are told, involve the digging up of a jester’s skull; and so, the story spirals backwards, through Hamlet, and back and back. To begin with, then, the novel gives you a choice of two protagonists to fall in love ...”

“... and influence is sought in a periodic ballyhooing of the ‘trans-Atlantic alliance’, as in Philip Bobbitt’s Terror and Consent (2008), which Niall Ferguson in an enthusiastic review claimed will ‘be read with pleasure by men of a certain age, class and education from Manhattan’s Upper East Side to London’s West End’. Ferguson himself is homo ...”

“... My mother is such a bloody rambling fool,’ wrote Philip Larkin in 1965, ‘that half the time I doubt her sanity. Two things she said today, for instance, were that she had “thought of getting a job in Woolworth’s” and that she wanted to win the football pools so that she could “give cocktail parties” ...”

“... mother refused to pay for his second year at Wisconsin). There he came under the spell of Sidney Hook, who was making waves with his lectures on Marxism. The attraction, for Schwartz, wasn’t ideological. (‘Political insight does not coincide with literary genius,’ he pronounced.) As he saw it, Marx stood for the historical factors that shaped human ...”

“... the second biggest UK bank after HSBC. Fred Goodwin was something of a hero in the banking world. Philip Delves Broughton, a former Telegraph journalist who went to Harvard to do an MBA and wrote a funny, depressing book about it, What They Teach You at Harvard Business School, reports that in 2003 the school made RBS the subject of one of its famous case ...”

“... protect the staff concerned. In The Golden Thread: Stitching Patient Safety into the NHS (2023), Philip Berry, another hepatology consultant, describes the usual approach of clinical investigators as ‘supportive’ of the medical staff, ‘forward-looking’, ‘soft’. All of this was true of the SI report into Martha’s death, though occasionally the ...”