“... walks a tightrope between remote media, genres and historical periods in a chapter that compares Robert Louis Stevenson’s short story ‘The Bottle Imp’ (1891) with David Robert Mitchell’s zombie film It Follows (2014). The former was published a year after the sovereign debt crisis brought about by the insolvency of ...”

“... or not I am legally a ‘UK citizen’, but only I can know if I feel British.Maria Sobolewska and Robert Ford’s Brexitland is a sweeping and rigorous demographic and attitudinal study of recent British history, which uses the 2016 EU referendum as a way of exploring the shifting sands of political identity since the Second World War. The political ...”

“... war on terror and the war in Iraq. Beyond all this he rejects the repudiation of history in the service of a faith-based future. While Dower’s instances of these failures are historically specific, the failures themselves are not. One could map much of what he rails against onto the ‘idols of the human mind’ that Francis Bacon identified in The ...”

“... not their least typical creation was what could be thought of as the West’s first civil service college, the cathedral chapter and school ” of Salisbury. Among Crouch’s other virtues is that he does not neglect the conquered English, one of whom saved William’s life in a rare defeat, while another, scion of a 1066 survivor, carried Henry’s ...”

“... then got left over.’ As it happens, Kay spent the war working for the London Auxiliary Ambulance Service, pulling out the dead and the injured from under buildings, driving an old grey van by night through broken, burning streets; but that isn’t the whole of her story. She’s also a 1940s version of the woebegone lover last seen so horribly keening ...”

“... wife, Anne of Bohemia, he may not have desired her sexually. His favourite and probable lover, Robert de Vere, also stayed childless through two marriages. Richard may have taken perverse comfort in his failure to beget a successor because it made him seem indispensable. Two hundred years later, another childless monarch, Elizabeth I, had John Hayward ...”

“... skiing in Klosters, and a ten-day break with Andrew in Barbados paid for by the multi-millionaire Robert Sangster.’ At this point, Sangster had been a tax exile for twelve years. Stay classy.The Yorks charged Hello! magazine a quarter of a million quid for pics of their ‘homelife’. They took £126,000 from the Daily Express for an interview. She charged ...”

“... concerned – one of the lightest-fingered authors living). In this case, the borrowings are from Robert Aldrich’s Whatever happened to Baby Jane? and John Fowles’s The Collector. A best-selling author, Paul Sheldon, crashes in a desolate area of the Rockies. It is winter, his car is buried in the snow, and his broken body is rescued by an eccentric ...”

“... possession of them and then they lose their appetites and get ill.’ Only the ‘robust, hardy’ Robert, older than Jack, and two years younger than Lolly, is never attacked. ‘Bobby has sensibility,’ his father wrote, ‘will love ideas and have enthusiasms, ardours, and will go through more emotional experiences in a month than another in ten ...”

“... many people left accounts of what she said and did; but it also meant, as her previous biographer, Robert Halsband, has demonstrated, that dubious anecdotes had a habit of attaching themselves to her. Though Grundy attempts to solve the problem of naming by reserving ‘Montagu’ for the literary career and ‘Lady Mary’ for the rest, the variousness of her ...”

“... the pawnshop’ to raise the cash. College students in Jiangxi ordered to volunteer for military service worried that they might end up ‘fighting against our own people’ – Mao Zedong’s Communists, whom Chiang was trying to wipe out before tackling the Japanese incursion. Chiang celebrated his birthday at a lunch with candles on two large cakes; the ...”

“... Cripplegate, he seems to have placed rails round the altar and introduced a monthly communion service. During his incumbency, consumption of communion wine doubled, an indication of the increased frequency of communion services, and perhaps of increased attendance at them. In Elizabethan and Jacobean England, these were all highly contentious matters, and ...”

“... A.V. Dicey had three principles; John Rawls had four. Waldron pokes fun at this approach – ‘Robert Summers holds the record, I think, with eighteen rule-of-law principles’ – but that doesn’t stop him drawing up a list of his own. As well as access to independent courts, he says, the rule of law requires ‘people in positions of state authority to ...”

“... interval between the horrors of the first half of the 20th century. The title is borrowed from Robert Graves and Alan Hodge, whose social history of Britain from 1918 to 1939, The Long Weekend, appeared in 1940, and it conjures up a sepia image of a tranquil Indian summer ‘in which the sun set slowly on the British Empire and the shadows lengthened on ...”

“... and gurgle of my stomach as well as the children next door.18 March. Geoffrey Palmer’s memorial service from St Paul’s Covent Garden, one of a growing number, I imagine, of those held on Zoom. I am unexpectedly on the verge of tears for someone who always put a smile on my face in art and life. I once told him that I was hoping to write a play, the first ...”