“... Barham Salih, then deputy prime minister of Iraq, sat in the garden of his Baghdad villa while a young internet entrepreneur called Jack Dorsey tried to persuade him that he needed to be on Twitter. Dorsey, the founder of Twitter, was in Baghdad at the invitation of the State Department. Over the previous three days, he and eight other Silicon Valley ...”

“... earlier. (Associated as it is with a sexually transmitted disease, and administered mostly to young women, the HPV vaccine has been an alembic for all sorts of fear and anxiety around female sexuality.) In the weeks following the initial hospitalisations, another 75 girls from the same school came forward with similar symptoms; before long, five hundred ...”

“... who was to become Lord Archer’, and a little later tells us that he was employed to teach Prince Andrew to write grammatically, I am at a loss. I feel there must be a joke in there somewhere. Of course it is a perfectly acceptable ploy for a writer to be deliberately silly but I simply cannot decide whether or not this is what Giles Gordon is doing. When he ...”

“... If so, in what context? The physical context was a seminar for the Japanese equivalent of the Young Conservatives. Nakasone’s statements were clearly not meant for foreign ears. He probably didn’t mean to offend American blacks and Hispanics, although he obviously did, which showed a curious degree of insensitivity for a man who prides himself on ...”

“... great Labour landslide year, that the first Nuffield election study appeared, with the hand of a young David Butler already apparent. It was, sadly, a jejune and disappointing volume which explains very little of the last great realigning election of modern times. Since then Butler has taken an increasingly dominant role in the enterprise and the books have ...”

“... birth certificate, ran away with the father’s chauffeur, Cesare Romati, when the boy was still young, and so his only memory of the divine Ada was of an unknown woman appearing ‘at the top landing, the voile of her beautiful gown floating behind her as she descended the stairs’. He was raised by a governess whom he called, with the callousness of ...”

“... Before that, his pleasure in the beauty of nature darkens when he remembers how other poets, young and strong, were reduced to wretchedness while still in their prime: I thought of Chatterton, the marvellous Boy, The sleepless soul that perished in his pride; Of Him who walked in glory and in joy Following his plough, along the mountain-side ...”

“... papers have switched over to a reliance on columnists and opinion. Back in the day, an ambitious young toad going into journalism would have seen All the President’s Men once too often, and would dream of bringing down governments with a single scoop. Good luck to them. Davies was like that. Today the equivalent ambitious ...”

“... remembered as a time of national unity that not only destroyed tyrannies overseas but assimilated young men from all regions and ethnic backgrounds into a shared American identity. The war in Vietnam, by contrast, is widely viewed as a needless contest fought by an army that fell apart while experiencing the aftershocks of social divisions at home. Its ...”

“... is one of the speeches Undershaft addresses to Cusins at the climax of Major Barbara, ‘Like all young men, you greatly exaggerate the difference between one young woman and another,’ then Freud has performed a little secondary elaboration. In substance it is fair. The ‘being in love’ is extrapolated from the ...”

“... King: a forger who could read Coptic, perhaps, but not write it without a crib. Another scholar, Andrew Bernhard, found a candidate for that crib: an interlinear translation of the Thomas gospel with idiosyncrasies that not only accounted for the mangled syntax of the fragment’s sixth line, but also replicated a missing letter in its first.King was careful ...”

“... stable and suitable for life.As an illustration, in 1983 Lovelock and the atmospheric scientist Andrew Watson devised Daisyworld, a computer simulation of a hypothetical world in which ecological competition between daisies of different colours affects planetary albedo, or the amount of solar radiation that is reflected back out into space – one of the ...”

“... craving for wealth and power, Leopold wanted to be a despot, not a minor constitutional king. Andrew Fitzmaurice deepens our understanding of the deviousness with which he created a colony in the Congo to funnel the profits of mass murder not to Belgium but to Leopold himself. Leopold knew that Belgium’s free-trading parliament would not tolerate the ...”

“... in medical and technological history in particular – at which it has made its fatal entrance. Andrew Nikiforuk, a Canadian journalist, argues in The Fourth Horseman that Aids is not as different as we suppose. The pandemic is driven by a familiar conjunction of economic and biological circumstances, which he refers to as the ‘dismal economies of ...”

“... shows how the maximum age for precocity in poets has been allowed to rise: one can be ‘young’ and ‘promising’ up to 40, a relief for late starters. But Andrew Elliott, in the Trio 4 collection, is ‘only’ 24: the best of these three Northern Irish poets, he is a mellifluous teller of fairytales, though ...”