“... the people. In his book, more a synthesis of published material than the product of new research, Michael Sheridan suggests that accounts of these years remain open to some doubt. The adolescent Xi is said to have spent his evenings reading Marx and making repeated attempts to join the party. Sheridan doesn’t see how The Communist Manifesto can have ...”

“... as ‘the practical expression’ of ‘the spirit of Dunkirk and the Blitz’. (Weight misses Michael Foot’s 1949 pamphlet on domestic reform entitled Who Are the Patriots Now?) A different kind of identity came to fruition during the Attlee Administration: new institutions were called ‘National’ or ‘British’ instead of ‘Royal’ – the ...”

“... quite innocent. What if the taxi driver who raped Jo is himself a Mapogo member? Doris just looked straight through this. Jo must be safe, she said. Here is the number, please phone him. The assumption being that any black man will always take more notice if it’s a white man who calls. John Magolego, it turned out, was a very calm, pleasant-sounding and ...”

“... not being ingratiating enough or trying to explain what the ‘drain problem’ was and graduating straight to the frenzied banging on the door; ‘your boyfriend’ didn’t help either. Like all crooks he was affronted when his honesty was questioned, if only because it implied a criticism of his performance. 4 February. I don’t imagine that my old Oxford ...”

“... unit. Some of the stories obtained this way were trivial, though intrusive: George Michael wept in his jail cell, for example, or a male British Airways worker secretly wore high heels. Others were more serious: security lapses at Heathrow, or equipment shortages in Afghanistan. Almost anything could be obtained if the offer was big enough: in ...”

“... in the country’s history, contested by two sons of the light-skinned post-independence elite: Michael Manley, the leader of the social democratic People’s National Party, and Edward Seaga, the leader of the conservative Jamaica Labour Party. The Jamaican system of ‘garrisons’ – social housing estates, usually built over bulldozed shantytowns, run ...”

“... had “schematised” them to conform to his argument.’ There’s a line – though not a straight one – between these early-century episodes and the disputes over Haeckel’s pictures that broke out in the 1990s. One new element was introduced by academic biologists wholly convinced of the fact of evolution. A group led by the English embryologist ...”

“... on the incoming secretary of state, Rex Tillerson, and Trump’s now ex-national security adviser, Michael Flynn. The rhetoric emanating from US politicians and media commentators too seems to be drawn from another era. In November, a murky online group called PropOrNot went full McCarthy by releasing ‘The List’, designed to name and shame – or indeed ...”

“... his schtick made room for the idea that he was a lovable old fraud.Riesman’s biography isn’t a straight-up demolition job. It includes a photograph of its author as an adolescent ‘circa 1998’ getting Lee to sign a comic, and aims for the tone of a fan who’s trying to be generous about his sometimes disappointing findings. Riesman doesn’t always ...”

“... or ‘straight-horned’, according to where they appear in the line of verse rather than where, or if, they appear on the ‘wine dark’, ‘grey’ or ‘loud-roaring’ sea: the Greeks’ ‘swift’ and ‘seafaring’ ships are beached throughout the ...”

“... may be yet. The closest parallels to Aids in epidemiological terms are syphilis and Hepatitis B. Michael Adler, in Aids and the Epidemics of History, lists the sudden appearance of syphilis (at the end of the 15th century), its asymptomatic carrier state and predominantly sexual means of transmission as the chief points of similarity. Hepatitis B, as Baruch ...”

“... was a brilliant place in Todd’s day, the staff including Patrick Blackett, Willis Jackson, Michael Polanyi and the historian L.B. Namier. When the war came, Todd was made chairman of the chemical committee responsible for the development and production of chemical warfare agents. After the war I served under Todd on a committee that had to make ...”

“... verbal and narrative digression. Fiction never quite presents anything as simple as an absolutely straight Cratylic name, which instantly manifests a character and a nature in a word. In a narrative or a drama there is necessarily some delay between the revelation of a name and the manifestation of a character’s nature. Even in allegories – which it’s ...”

“... it to bubble and sweat in confirmation. Lifting the barrier at Gate 10 he warned me to drive straight ahead, without deviation, looking neither to left nor right. I’d find Mr Gibbons waiting at Gate 3A. (It was comforting, while cruising this reclaimed Tarkovsky end-zone, to see that ubiquitous boards for the big construction firms doubled as ...”

“... peasant who, having stumbled on political power, is unsure how to wield it. Reporting on Michael Portillo’s visit as defence minister to Slovenia, Romania, Bulgaria and Macedonia in 1996, Anne Applebaum (coincidentally, for the Evening Standard) has a good old chuckle: Up and down the red carpets he walks, Her Majesty’s aircraft just behind ...”