“... although Channon thought it more Far from the Madding Crowd: ‘She is Bathsheba, Sergeant Frank Troy, Mr Woodman.’In 1938, Honor’s sister Patricia married another Tory MP, Alan Lennox-Boyd. From this point, the Diaries give an unmatched account of clandestine queer life in that era. Channon developed a passion for having a ‘Turker’ or Turkish ...”

“... is patterned on the one in Moscow, which owes much, in turn, to the London Underground. Frank Pick, one of the guiding geniuses of the glory days of the Tube between the wars, was given a medal by Stalin in 1932 (although he did not, as Wolmar romantically suggests, meet the dictator in person). When work began on the Moscow metro in 1931, it was ...”

“... two dogs. He acknowledged various influences down the years, but the Nelson Riddle production of Frank Sinatra’s In the Wee Small Hours (1955) seems to have been key in suggesting the idea of a self-contained suite. Like the Sinatra classic, Pet Sounds can be enjoyed simply as a great collection of songs, as immersive mood music, or as a sketch of a young ...”

“... of Skopelos to the chariots often depicted on pots. But until the 1952 decipherment of Linear B by Michael Ventris and John Chadwick, the ruling orthodoxy was that a hypothesised ‘Minoan’ was the (un-Greek) language of the palace culture of Crete and the Mycenaean settlements, so that the origins of the Iliad must come after that, not earlier than the ...”

“... begun to dominate political debate in Ireland to such as an extent that, as Clarke’s biographer Michael Foy has written, ‘Dublin Castle believed that no secret society was active in Ireland and wanted the police to concentrate instead on open organisations like the Gaelic League, the Gaelic Athletic Association and Sinn Féin.’ In other words, the ...”

“... of what the EU had become. Once the campaign began, two of his leading cabinet ministers – Michael Gove the slyest and Boris Johnson the most popular of his colleagues, neither of them close to the ERG, both actuated by career rather than conviction – declared themselves for Leave.In parliamentary terms, Remain still had a winning hand, since ...”

“... Auden went to Portugal to work on a play, The Ascent of F-6, with Isherwood. The protagonist, Michael Ransom, sets out to conquer a faraway mountain in a place called Sudoland. If he succeeds, it will add to the honour and glory of England. When he finally reaches the summit, he meets his mother, who is a sort of Britannia. He is eulogised as one of ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... and ploughing, in alphabetical order, along shelves of American poetry. It took a while to reach Frank O’Hara, Olson and Wallace Stevens.Ian Brinton, retired from his role as head of English at Dulwich College, agreed to meet me for a conversation about Prynne’s childhood. He attended Bramble Wood School, the infant collective run by Muriel Prynne from ...”

“... 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 ...”