“... have cruised down the Lea Valley from Lippitt’s Hill Camp at High Beach, a base right beside John Clare’s Epping Forest asylum, and they’ll be back again tomorrow. Sukhdev Sandhu, who flew with the sky cops for his book Night Haunts, called the experience ‘the panoptic sublime’. The machines cost half a million pounds each, a sum that pays for a ...”

“... murder and atrocious cruelty were European monopolies. A look into Aztec or Mayan history, or into John Roscoe’s early 20th-century history of the Buganda kingdom, will correct any such error. What seems to have been a specially European capacity, from the early medieval period, was the resort to instant, frantic aggression as ‘shock and awe’ to break an ...”

“... herself; the trouble was that Peters did too.In the autumn of 1973, Joan Didion and her husband, John Gregory Dunne, had approached Warner Bros offering to write a new version of A Star Is Born. The original film from 1937 and its 1954 remake with Judy Garland had been set in Hollywood, but Didion and Dunne wanted to explore the music industry. Several ...”

“... were awaited with interest. Since it opened to the public in 1985, the Saatchi collection in St John’s Wood has become a focus of what’s called the contemporary art debate. With every purchase, names are made and names are called. But Saatchi’s taste, his collecting policy, is eclectic and elusive. So much art, of so many kinds, has passed into and ...”

“... and even less well resourced: in 2020, before the Troubles Legacy Act was passed, Chief Constable Simon Byrne claimed it would take twenty years to get through its outstanding caseload. Legacy inquests have dragged on for years, too, in part because government departments have been slow to disclose information requested by the courts.In 2015, with the help of ...”

“... in his own day could be accounted Powell’s leading champion. In a front-page spread in the TLS, John Bayley hailed him under the banner of ‘A Family and Its Fictions’. There was a conflict in Powell, he explained, between the Gothic and Gallic sides of his imagination, which lent much of the richness to his work – provided the former, with its better ...”

“... income by 2020. In Taking Power Back, his 2015 book calling for a renewal of local democracy, Simon Parker describes the consequences as ‘perhaps the biggest shift in the role of the British state since 1945’. There is currently a very real risk that Brexit will distract from austerity – no longer the disaster du jour – which will nonetheless ...”

“... from the Odyssey to Virginia Woolf, whose route included Ammianus, Gregory of Tours, Saint-Simon, historians and memorialists along with poets and novelists. Literature thus both preceded history in Ginzburg’s cursus, and has always thereafter lain adjacent to it. There is a long tradition of the practice of history as a branch of literature, but ...”

“... some of the best contemporary poets and translators such as Alastair Reid, Richard Wilbur and John Hollander. He also worked with Borges on translating his prose works into English, and coaxed him into producing new stories and a long autobiographical piece for the New Yorker. All of this is vividly described in The Lesson of the Master: On Borges and His ...”

“... and reads like a Fifties novel of provincial life, though not one written by him so much as by John Wain or Keith Waterhouse. Indeed Ruth sounds (or Larkin makes her sound) like Billy Liar’s unsatisfactory girlfriend, whose snog-inhibiting Jaffa Billy hurls to the other end of the cemetery. Having laid out a grand total of 15s. 7d. on an evening with ...”

“... can’t carry much at my age. A little pint bottle is quite heavy.’ He introduced me to John Russell, an 88-year-old ex-engineer in a residential care home. ‘I saw one old lady trying to stagger off with six bottles,’ Russell said. ‘They were carried for her by a complete stranger.’ He introduced me to Joan Bufton, whose daughter needs ...”

“... looking now. You know what used to happen when Dominic Cummings arranged to meet the journalist Simon Walters, formerly at the Daily Mail?’I frowned. ‘No, why would I, and why would he be doing that? Cummings had nothing to do with the media, did he? That was the head of Number 10 comms’s job.’She laughed. ‘You are so, so going to have your eyes ...”

“... from La Paz to view the body, and the famous photographs were taken – later compared by John Berger to Mantegna’s Dead Christ and Rembrandt’s Anatomy Lesson. That evening, when the journalists had gone, the two local doctors performed an autopsy, which showed beyond doubt that Guevara had been shot long after capture, though this only emerged ...”

“... That’s what he said without prompting, and on the Wednesday evening he had a conversation with John Barradell, the City of London’s extremely well-connected town clerk. Barradell has what you might call a leading interest in the operations of London Resilience, the set of protocols that go into action during a major emergency in the capital. At this ...”