“... ridiculous. Literary artists have worked in the genre: Poe, Wilkie Collins, Simenon, Chandler and Michael Innes among others. But the true English ‘classics’ of the 1920s and Thirties, the books we evoke in recalling a body in a locked library in a country house, hardly go in for artistry. V.S. Pritchett once wrote down the whole genre as philistine, and ...”

“... fascist Christian terrorist and mystic Corneliu Codreanu, founder of the Legion of the Archangel Michael, later known as the Iron Guard, and Marshal Ion Antonescu, dictator during the Second World War, were responsible for the killing. Codreanu, strangled on royal orders in 1938, was the hugely influential prophet of a fanatical creed of blood, soil and ...”

“... friend who had done most to look after the dying Acker and whom she had appointed her executor. Frank Molinaro, whom Acker had paid for astrological advice, passed out business cards in the car park, then grabbed hold of the vase with the cremains in it. ‘The astrologer ran toward the sea tossing handfuls of ash and bone while he proclaimed ...”

“... from the Cedar Tavern set, the Abstract Expressionists. You could be a fag back then, like Frank O’Hara, as long as you could pass, and understood you were supposed to suffer over it, lusting after those real guys painting their heroic, tortured canvases. Andy was a swish. A swish was someone who couldn’t hide it.One contemporary noted the ...”

“... the WHO, Tedros Adhanom Ghebreyesus, were to blame for the severity of the pandemic. ‘We must be frank about one of the primary reasons this outbreak spun out of control,’ Azar said.There was a failure by this organisation to obtain the information that the world needed, and that failure cost many lives … In an apparent attempt to conceal this ...”

“... XR took the government and the public by surprise. At the end of the month an XR delegation met Michael Gove, the environment secretary at the time, and in May Parliament voted to declare a ‘climate change emergency’. But it was government, not Parliament, to which XR had addressed its first demand and as far as they’re concerned, it has yet to be ...”

“... primal scream (Spain 1982); Maradona’s ‘Hand of God’ leap over Peter Shilton (Mexico 1986); Frank Rijkaard’s fleck of gob caught mid-parabola towards Rudi Völler’s perm, and Gazza’s tears, and Maradona’s tears (Italy 1990); Roberto Baggio’s penalty soaring over the bar (USA 1994); Zinedine Zidane walking past the trophy, head bowed, having ...”

“... dealings with the church: ‘My relationship with the church was excellent. It was very cordial, frank and open.’ During the dictatorship, Admiral Massera played tennis with the papal nuncio, Pio Laghi, once a fortnight. It was arranged for Massera to have an audience with Pope Paul VI on a visit to Rome in 1977. In the same year, he was invited to give a ...”

“... CIA involvement in its finances, another idea came up. Some of those figures like Stephen Spender, Frank Kermode and Stuart Hampshire wanted to start a counter-magazine.I don’t think ‘Encounter’ had folded by then.No, it hadn’t but Spender had left. Spender was a big figure in the CIA controversy. So the projected magazine would be a counter-Encounter ...”

“... in the mid-1990s. Asked about it a decade later, the CIA official in charge of the programme, Michael Scheuer, simply said: ‘I check my moral qualms at the door.’ As one would expect, it was Britain that collaborated with the first renditions, in the company of Croatia and Albania. Under the Bush administration, the programme expanded. Three weeks ...”

“... with a publisher with authors like James, Strindberg, Ford and Belloc historically on its list. As Michael Barber, an earlier biographer of Powell, without access to his archives, remarked, it was a period where a little privilege went a long way. There is no reason to doubt that at least in his first year in the capital, Powell felt at sea in London, of ...”

“... of the word ‘bloody’. He then named a 23-year-old Trinity College Dublin graduate student, Michael Clear, who quickly denied it. The story went nowhere and Clear went back to his studies. Then Leah McGrath Goodman wrote a piece for Newsweek claiming Satoshi was a maths genius called Dorian Nakamoto, who lived in the Californian suburb of Temple City ...”