“... we were all such boys.’ This is how I remember my early days working for the BBC in the 1960s. John Fortune, John Bird, Keith Waterhouse and Willis Hall: we were all such boys too and it seemed such play. Less play was Beyond the Fringe, but that had its sillier side. Dudley Moore had an act – never, I think, done in ...”

“... Slater and Maya Slater, prompts us to ask again: ‘What is Tourguéneffish?’ Edmund Wilson, John Bayley and others have made the point that Turgenev in the original is more ‘textured’, modulated and idiomatic (‘He is interested in words,’ Wilson wrote, ‘in a way that the other great 19th-century Russian novelists – with the exception of ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... us as a Jewish state?’ Barak writes in his memoir. ‘Your rhetoric suggests you have spines of steel,’ he says he told Netanyahu. ‘But your behaviour is living proof of the old saying that it’s easier to take the Jews out of the galut’ – the diaspora – ‘than to take the galut out of the Jews.’ In Barak’s view, Netanyahu sounded not so ...”

“... of a revolutionary dreamer. As the mainstream right talked warily of selling off parts of the steel industry, Littlechild jumped ahead to what few others imagined could be the future: to the privatisation of the railways and the Post Office. ‘What the Post Office needs,’ he wrote, ‘is an imaginative asset stripper.’ His most extreme ideas, by the ...”

“... a measly $277,000. Its origins date back to the first stage of integration: the European Coal and Steel Community (ECSC) born of the Schuman Plan was endowed with a Court of Justice that was rolled forward into the European Economic Community set up by the Treaty of Rome five years later, and then into the European Union created at Maastricht.Thanks to the ...”

“... their profit-eyed, zoned-out heroes.Prince​ was born on 7 June 1958 in Minneapolis. His father, John L. Nelson, was 42 at the time; his mother, Mattie Shaw, was 25. His first name was the one his father performed under in a local jazz combo: Prince Rogers. During Prince’s teenage years it was a volatile household. Listening to ‘When Doves Cry’ is like ...”

“... for the most burglaries in England. The British Epilepsy Association is offices only but has a steel door, having been broken into three times, one of them a ram-raid; so, coming away, I’m perhaps more conscious of vandalism and urban decay than I otherwise might be. The result is, when I see a starved-looking boy of ten and his sister, twelve or ...”

“... won admirers among the black writers who emerged during the Black Power era, such as LeRoi Jones, John A. Williams and Ishmael Reed. And his legacy now? As Jackson writes, ‘history has borne out some of his vinegary judgments.’ Today, Himes’s belief in the implacable force of white supremacism – what is now called Afro-pessimism – enjoys a growing ...”

“... in the North, campaigned against Britain joining the EEC at the 1975 referendum. His successor, John Ryman, later jailed for (non-political) fraud, also disdained the Common Market. He called Helmut Schmidt a ‘patronising Hun’. Ronnie Campbell was a die-hard Lexiter; his Tory successor, Ian Levy, rode to victory on Brexit. The figures from the 1975 ...”

“... of Moscow and the dominion of the world. Americans are readily alarmed, sometimes even panicked. John Foster Dulles, who worked for Truman and then became Secretary of State to Eisenhower, with a single-mindedness matching Mao’s lashed together a ring-fence around China, designed to contain the eastern end of the presumed Sino-Soviet monolith as Nato ...”

“... million ‘illegal aliens’ had been apprehended the previous year. People could cut holes in the steel panels or climb them – there were useful toe and hand holds – but the wall put an end to cars and pick-ups going across and set up a physical marker between north and south. As it grew, it transformed a line defined by international treaty, a few dusty ...”

“... and they were numerous, included both Fitzgeralds, the New York society hostess Muriel Draper, John Dos Passos, Dorothy Parker, Nancy Mitford, Dawn Powell, even Mary McCarthy, whose rivalrousness towards other intellectual women is legendary. The fact that Murphy seems to have been one of the kindliest people on earth no doubt only magnified her ...”

“... When​ T.S. Eliot asked John Hayward in February 1938 to act as his literary executor (‘in case some unexpected calamity cuts me down like a flower’), he told him to prevent publication of his literary remains – including ‘any letters at all of any intimacy to anybody’. ‘In fact,’ he added, ‘I have a mania for posthumous privacy ...”

“... though even less tolerant towards ‘Rome’, was less solidly home-grown in inspiration. John Knox’s church drew its theological ideas from constant European travel, the movement of black-clad divines between Edinburgh and the Calvinist centres in Geneva, the Netherlands and Germany.The third attempt to turn the white cliffs into a red line is the ...”