“... egotists or – if they are any good in bed – deemed ‘Latin’ lovers. Sex may be enjoyable but it ‘oh, it MUST mean something!’ Promiscuity is morally dangerous; being left ‘on the shelf’ even worse. Marriage is still the ultimate goal: ‘I’d tackle it as a full-time job demanding all my intelligence and wit and charm. I’d ...”

“... worrying about the weather. At one point, she was leading Hillary Clinton in the polls, but she may have been damaged by her repeated insistence that she had seen a film where members of Planned Parenthood discuss selling foetal organs: ‘I dare Hillary Clinton, Barack Obama to watch these tapes. Watch a fully formed foetus on the table, its heart ...”

“... every soldier committed – who, at that date, could only be British. At the White House on 29 May 1942 Roosevelt told Molotov that he wanted to ‘take the risk’ of mounting an operation on the continent with six to ten divisions: ‘It is necessary to make sacrifices to help the USSR in 1942. It is possible that we shall have to live through another ...”

“... checked by the executive, as that is again by the legislative; all parts moving, and however they may follow the particular interests of their body, yet all uniting at last for the public good.’ No sign here of the tyrant denounced by Thomas Jefferson in the more vituperative passages of the Declaration of Independence. All this goes to support Roberts’s ...”

“... 23 or 24 ad, he fought a series of campaigns in Germania under Claudius in the 40s and 50s, which may have inspired him to write his lost book on the art of throwing the javelin from horseback, as well as his lost history of the German wars. He seems to have kept his head down in the dangerous later years of Nero’s reign, when he wrote his eight-volume ...”

“... or work around selective availability, and make their products more accurate in spite of it. In May 2000 the military stopped degrading the civilian GPS signal. Sales of GPS receivers soared. It isn’t just every phone and every Uber car that’s now fitted with GPS; in some parts of the world it’s every tractor too. And not because farmers need to be ...”

“... and the suits and countersuits dragged on for years. That isn’t such a pleasing tale – and it may not be the story that Parton, who eventually reconciled with Wagoner, wanted to tell – but it’s what happened. Why not tell it straight?There’s​ a lot more Burns gets wrong, or sweeps under the carpet, and that ...”

“... In​ 2016, Theresa May told the Conservative Party Conference: ‘If you believe you’re a citizen of the world, you’re a citizen of nowhere. You don’t understand what the very word “citizenship” means.’ This characterisation was not – rightly not – considered antisemitic, merely an appeal to the autochthonic Brexiter mentality ...”

“... Marcus wrote in 1975. Gradually, the image morphed into something more modern: ‘Robert Johnson may be the first ever rock star,’ the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame said when it inducted him in 1986, the year it opened. Wald was especially good at articulating Johnson’s appeal without resorting to superstition or stereotypes:For his original fans, he was a ...”

“... and drunkenness are unlikely to be tolerated (how they will be policed is another matter). Beer may be the drug of choice at men’s football matches in Europe and Latin America, but having experienced the collective euphoria of watching England’s women winning the European Championships at Wembley this summer without encountering a single drunk or ...”

“... So Thatcherism has no majority; it exists ‘at the level of 10 or 15 per cent, whatever it may really be’. Now, if one is going to launch forth as a speaker and writer in political analysis, this won’t do. The polls provide exact figures about the Tory vote and about what percentages favour this or that policy option, and one needs to be able to ...”

“... or 33 or 36, just as they know that if they have not reached a certain place in the hierarchy they may later on be considered ‘too old’ at forty or fifty for any job at all. If they are on the ladder but have failed to get advancement at the critical age, they can calculate the highest level they might reach in twenty years’ time as long as they do not ...”

“... the caterpillar feet Of these predictions lead nowhere, It is necessary to understand That a poet may not exist, that his writings Are the incomplete circle and straight drop Of a question mark ... In the 18th century Paley deduced the reality of God from a watch: Malley, who, Ethel reports approvingly, ‘made a fair amount of money repairing watches’, is ...”

“... pedantic Theorists ... I see no use however in attempting to Frenchify the English nation, and you may be quite sure that the English Nation will not consent to be Frenchified.’ On the face of it, nothing could better exemplify the opposition between steam-driven, market-led, up-to-the-minute commercial principles, purporting to be based on universal laws ...”

“... discover what made him such a worrier and a bad sleeper? And even if we exhaust these approaches, may we not be addressing the problem from the wrong angle? For it could be, not that the accountant was late for his bus, but that his bus, for once, was early. If so, we shall have to find out about the state of the traffic and perhaps about the personality, and ...”