“... So what did Aunty Selma feel when she watched Yassir Arafat shake hands with Yitzhak Rabin on the White House lawn over a year ago? Her eyebrows arched suddenly. ‘I thought: “Oh God, what a world.” I thought: “Halas, it’s finished, it’s over. Now I will never be able to go back.” What it needs is for the British to make a decision to let us ...”

“... spies by a don, and it is by far the most sensible account so far written. It is the best because Christopher Andrew is a historian at Corpus Christi, Cambridge who has become the leading authority on the Intelligence services. Indeed, a book by him on the Intelligence community is coming out in the autumn. In his piece here he explains how the Cambridge ...”

“... them as being ‘dressed as for yachting’ (their summer uniform consisted of stripy blazers, white trousers and matching tasselled blue shoes).Having to deal with such people can’t have done much to alter the brothers’ sense of being at odds with a hidebound establishment. That feeling became even more ingrained after they bought Brecqhou, one of the ...”

“... that adjust the size of breasts or muscles. You’re then booted into a sort of bot purgatory: a white-walled waiting room, sparsely furnished, where the avatar paces like a prisoner, waiting for you to strike up conversation. Users are encouraged to customise the room with furniture and acquire new outfits using in-app currency. This can be bought with real ...”

“... or at least has done since 1913 – Bordwell offers us an illustration from a film called Red and White Roses, released in that year. Of course, not even Bazin was arguing that montage was all bad, or that films could or should abandon it entirely, and the idea that film history consists of battles between the two approaches is as rigid and unhandy as the ...”

“... grand and wealthy Margot Beste-Chetwynde. As it happens, her riches derive principally from the white slave trade, in which Pennyfeather becomes unwittingly implicated, and for which he uncomplainingly takes the rap. After some strings are pulled, however, he is released from prison and goes back to Oxford to pursue his theology degree. So anonymous a ...”

“... and might not; and then, in noticeably poorer country, Irish Republic tricolours, their green-white-orange optimistically symbolising reconciliation between Catholic and Protestant. Signs reading UDA and RIRA (both, in our understanding, illegal organisations) suggested that Ireland is not quite there yet, as did our first roadblock, between Armagh and ...”

“... Nikki’s body would be pixellated. Boyd – an inky dragon crawling out from the neckline of his white T-shirt – looked impassively at his screen as the camera tracked Nikki’s last journey through the Old Exchange Building, from the gap in a partially boarded-up window round the back through which she was pushed, to the basement, where her body was ...”

“... the 1960s and after by Kingsley Amis and Robert Conquest. It also contains a letter from Amis to Christopher Hitchens, which is needling enough (‘Do you admire terror? I know you admire freedom’) in the rhetorical pressure it applies on an old friend to renounce Lenin, Trotsky and all their works, but ends by sending ‘fraternal love, as always’. Amis ...”

“... sprawl scattered like so much confetti over the gnarly green terrain. In the distance, the tall white cluster of buildings that formed downtown Los Angeles poked through a corona of smog. Coming into view below was my destination: the 480-acre subdivision established in 1887 and named ‘Hollywood’ by a real estate speculator’s wife because, she ...”

“... terrorism and Communism. With the compliance (not to say indifference) of the higher-ups in the White House and in the State and Defence Departments, the country’s foreign policy has been handed over to these new warriors, who see nothing wrong with committing the economy and national security to a state of permanent war. Every one of the main actors in ...”

“... part we were finally installed on seats in front of the pavilion, the soothing sight of green and white displayed before us. Although hardly an enthusiast by temperament, Frank was a cricket-lover, always reading the scores in the sports pages and watching the TV highlights. He had played regularly while a lecturer at Reading in the 1950s (‘I was never any ...”

“... of the war on terror and its advocates (one of his early books was subtitled ‘The Trial of Christopher Hitchens’), then of the economic austerity that followed the 2008 crash. Like Hitchens, Seymour is a former Trotskyite; he left the Socialist Workers Party in 2013 when it imploded over allegations of sexual assault by a senior member. Unlike ...”

“... Boulez observed that Messiaen practised juxtaposition rather than composition, he had a point. As Christopher Dingle argues in his contribution to Messiaen in Context, Messiaen was ‘primarily an orchestral composer’, ‘implicitly orchestrating his music even when no orchestra was involved’. The piano and organ were the pillars of his ...”

“... of United Biscuits, which gave £632,500 to the Party during the Thatcher years); Sir Gordon White (head of the US arm of Hanson, which gave £652,000 to the Tories and £100,000 to the Centre for Policy Studies in 1981-90); Sir Jeffrey Sterling (head of P & O, which gave £370,000 during the Thatcher years); Peter Palumbo (Chairman of the Arts Council ...”