“... heroic soldiers and airmen still living. He works out that a million men and a million women in Britain are queer, and turns the tables in one indignant phrase: ‘I sometimes think we homosexuals are absurdly tolerant.’ Frustrated common sense had marked an essay by the married but gay-friendly Edward Hyams in a special issue of the New Statesman in 1960 ...”

“... there were a couple of titles by Ngaio Marsh, a batch of paperbacks by Dennis Wheatley and Ian Fleming and an incomplete, untouched set of Dickens in pale blue cloth bindings. Nobody went near the Dickens – Colin, a reader of contemporary paperbacks only, declared a hatred of him for his infatuation with the poor and his longwindedness. Maureen ...”

“... fans were crushed to death, people were already wondering what the disaster at Grenfell said about Britain and the way we live. ‘We have to look this in the eye,’ one of the police officers later said to me. The fire hadn’t even reached its dreadful zenith before the TV announcers began shaking their heads and looking for austerity commentators and ...”

“... integral nationalism of the interwar period was given a new impetus when Menderes – solicited by Britain – took up the cause of the Turkish minority in Cyprus, reclaiming rights of intervention in the island relinquished at Lausanne. In 1955, as a Three-Power Conference on its future was meeting in London, his regime unleashed a pogrom against the Greek ...”