“... this summer. On 29 June, after Stella Creasy put forward an amendment to the Queen’s Speech, Philip Hammond announced that Northern Irish women who travelled to England for an abortion could for the first time have that abortion paid for by the NHS, like every other citizen and taxpayer of the UK. Sixteen ‘terminations of pregnancy’ officially took ...”

“... key debates can be carried on almost unseen in long afternotes. Even such an authoritative work as Philip Williams’s Gaitskell, with its unrivalled picture of postwar Labour politics, wholly omits Gaitskell’s colourful sex life. ‘I decided at the outset I wasn’t going into all that,’ he told me. American biography, as Robert Caro’s vast Life of LBJ ...”

“... by the elegant, modernising leader of the Ethiopians, Ras Tafari Makonnen, a.k.a. Haile Selassie. Short, combative and mischievous, Steer arrived in Addis in July, equipped with a typewriter, a shotgun and tropical kit. The temptation to graft him onto Scoop is strong: the war had yet to start and he was one of dozens of journalists holed up in the Hotel ...”

“... aureus has not had the attention it deserved because its list of famous victims is so short. Even famous illnesses caused by it have escaped bacteriological attribution. Queen Victoria’s armpit abscess in 1871 poured pus for days after it was cut open by Joseph Lister. All that is remembered is the carbolic spray getting into her ...”

“... science and philosophy of mind at several universities and has also written successful novels and short stories, including The Mind-Body Problem and Properties of Light: A Novel of Love, Betrayal and Quantum Physics. What she does very well is to provide a vivid biographical picture of Gödel, beginning midstream with his touching relationship with Einstein ...”

“... Clementine, however, in 1935, while on a Pacific cruise, had a platonic affair with Terence Philip, a worldly and handsome art dealer, which Mary Soames frankly recounts in one of her editorial interventions, but to which there is no reference in the letters. ‘Don’t be disloyal to me in thought,’ writes Churchill to Clementine from HMS Enchantress ...”

“... in (and around) 1614 by poets and historians, an anxiety given focus by the breakdown of the short-lived Parliament that was called in the spring and by the imprisonment of the Crown’s principal critics within it. The lecture by Conrad Russell, the dominant historian of the politics of the period, found no place for such sentiments. To him the ...”

“... his strong-willed daughter back from Paris, where she had gone looking for a fresh start after a short-lived marriage to a Belgian banker, gave her the job of choosing an alternative. It was a privilege that would change her life and Building Seagram chronicles her valiant attempt to bring a bohemian spirit to a corporate building. With the help of ...”

“... Richard Cobb, often in a class as small as an early Christian cenacle, was to be taught life,’ Philip Mansel recalled. ‘He did not simply describe, he transformed himself into a farmer overeating merely for the pleasure of depriving Parisians of their food; a revolutionary who had marinated in envy all his life and was using his position on the Committee ...”

“... or mixed. These internalised microgeographies – of small urban pockets such as Sandy Row or the Short Strand – provide the matter of sectarian conflict, for, as the acerbic historian Joe Lee lamented, Ulster has a ‘dearth of major atheist settlements’. Geography also presents challenges on a larger scale. The incomer from ‘GB’, as Ulster folk call ...”

“... on against headaches, depression and the Ministry of Information, for which she made several short films until the officials decided that Road Safety for Children was too important a subject to be trusted to a woman. The Boxes were unusual but not quite alone in their day. Jill Craigie was making documentaries and Cooke points to a clutch of films from A ...”

“... including Bethe. When Bethe himself was put to the test by an assault on his Cornell colleague, Philip Morrison, he sprang to Morrison’s defence, though it was perhaps less daunting for Bethe to stand up to a university committee of inquiry than it was for Oppenheimer to face down the rampaging House Committee on Un-American Activities. And, while ...”

“... read about the murder that week, on the day he finished a biography of the science fiction writer Philip K. Dick, Emmanuel Carrère, writer, père de famille, and Romand’s contemporary, finally decided that the only person who could answer the questions that had begun to trouble him was Romand himself. Six months after the murders he wrote to Romand in ...”

“... biographer, says his subject is ‘a man of perfect charm and fascination. A monster, in short.’ Not unlike the novel’s author. ‘I suspect Cromwell was right,’ Vice President Burr tells Schuyler, ‘the man who does not know where he is going goes farthest. Talleyrand used to tell me that for the great man all is accident. Obviously, he was ...”

“... for, and was accompanied by Raymond Unwin, the future architect of Letchworth Garden City, and Philip Dalmas, a Whitmanite who drifted around the Northern countryside carrying a baize bag filled with vegetables. The visitors overstayed their welcome: they ate their vegetarian dinner, and didn’t leave until 10 p.m. During the evening, there was some ...”