“... as a faintly preposterous dandy: ‘His silver grey suits, pink shirts, with his powdered pink and white face, his nerves, his manners, his love of praise’. ‘You make a distressingly lifelike loose woman,’ Runciman gasped after seeing him in a college sketch show. Runciman, who had won a scholarship to read history at Trinity, fitted naturally into this ...”

“... Susan’s youngest daughter Bella had worked as a housekeeper for the local schoolmaster, Bossy White, but after her marriage in 1924 her labour was confined to the home. Her wedding exemplified the patterns of gender segregation common in many mining communities; after the celebratory meal, all the men – Bella’s new husband included – left for the ...”

“... then home secretary. In 1988 Mrs Thatcher banned his voice from being broadcast but a decade later Tony Blair negotiated with him as a key participant in the peace process. Today he has easy access to the top British leadership. But Adams has not been entirely rehabilitated. In 2013 the police questioned him about his failure to disclose his brother’s sex ...”

“... shy and misunderstood. The following year he received a presidential pardon due in part, the White House said, to lobbying by the powerful and unlikely duo of Henry Kissinger and Elton John. Nonetheless Amiel remains furious at the way she and Black have been treated and is intent on establishing his innocence on all counts. Her memoir is a bookend to ...”

“... to enhance ‘Nato’s credibility’.At the height of the Kosovo war, Freedman made some edits on Tony Blair’s Chicago speech on the ‘Doctrine of the International Community’. His memo, which was disclosed by the Chilcot Inquiry, shows the difference between Freedman’s published work and his private counsel. The rhetoric – ‘our fighting men and ...”

“... was contrived for off-the-record briefing of American journalists, the joint ‘authors’ being Tony Benn, Stan Orme and Denis Healey. One is tempted to say that even in the MI5 officers’ mess, the idea of Denis Healey collaborating with Messrs Benn and Orme on anything at all must surely have required the assistance of a few double whiskies. The ...”

“... is seductive. As she says, ‘ministers of governments of all shades, energy ministers such as Tony Benn and Peter Walker, civil servants, employees of public utilities, have sat, like Jonson’s Puritans, open-mouthed and bemused, listening to the flood of jargon which has promised that the millennium is just around the corner. Billions of pounds of ...”

“... if ever there was one, all bunting and border controls – which seemed to represent a victory for white van men everywhere. A huge Tory majority looked like the next tabloid fantasy to come true, shoving Britain down a Trump-shaped hole into a post-truth world.That the Daily Mirror, despite being a tabloid, tends not to be written about as if it were one is ...”

“... Friedland and Hecht had a revealing conversation with Stan Cohen, who was formerly part of the white resistance to South Africa’s apartheid regime and now teaches at the Hebrew University’s law school. Cohen is relieved that Israel never developed a theory of racial supremacy, but sees many parallels between the two apartheid regimes and thinks that ...”

“... as far as nuclear weapons are concerned, Iraq is much less of a threat now than it was in 1991. Tony Blair and George W. Bush do not want us to think like this. Khidhir Hamza is the source of many of the headlines claiming that Iraq is on the verge of (or already has) a nuclear weapon capability. The Guardian reported on 1 August that Iraq would have ...”

“... Nuala Ní Dhomhnaill, its postwar section makes room for Monty Python but not Geoffrey Hill, or Tony Harrison, or Thom Gunn, or Ted Hughes, or Craig Raine, or James Fenton, or Paul Muldoon, all of whom the Norton squeezes in at the eleventh hour. Ricks, for whom Heaney provides an effective endpoint, is probably right that many anthologies falter with the ...”

“... assurance, the nonchalant way he let the vinegar run from the chip-bag onto the breast of his off-white shirt. But I kept all this quiet knowing there were things he envied about me too. I think each of us treasured this envy, longing to know how the other had changed but disdaining to ask. His friend, Jamie, tells the narrator that he has seen the woman who ...”

“... published in the LRB (5 August). The idea for the poem came from a comment in an excellent book by Tony Sharpe on Wallace Stevens, in which he speculates on the flocks of pigeons mentioned in the last lines of ‘Sunday Morning’: And, in the isolation of the sky, At evening, casual flocks of pigeons make Ambiguous undulations as they sink, Downward to ...”

“... why his political satire, which generally comes across as crass and simplistic on the page (Stupid White Men, Dude, Where’s My Country?), rises to a different level on the screen. By the time he found his medium, with the film Roger and Me in 1989, he had spent more than a decade in various ventures in print journalism, all of which ended in ...”

“... I found the sight of district nurses in their navy blue raincoats both reassuring and appropriate. White coats have gone too now, with doctors indistinguishable from patients except that the doctors are in shirt-sleeves. I like white coats. But then I’m a butcher’s son. White coats ...”