“... the first time. During 11 long days at the Old Bailey, luck was with us. Ponting’s solicitor, Brian Raymond, was resourceful. Merlyn Rees agreed to be a witness, and most effective he was. The jury was taken aback when Mr Heseltine’s Civil Service Private Secretary, Richard Mottram, casually revealed, to the incredulity of Ponting’s counsel and the ...”

“... about faith-healing, it was turned down by the studios for whom it was written. The actress Sharon Stone had acquired the property, which she claimed to have discovered by her own ‘detective work’: in fact, ‘Jacob’s Hands’ had been known about at least since Brian Finney’s 1979 biography. Film rights were sold ...”

“... fine. This is where you feel slightly homosexual and left-wing if you don’t weigh twenty-five stone.’ Reagan is greeted with laughter, applause, cheers and whoops; the whooping seems to be a new development, but a mere supplement to the laughter, which doesn’t ‘express high spirits or amusement but a willed raucousness’. Another thing they do with ...”

“... described it as a ‘real priority’ and Ed Miliband visited the town, promising ‘to leave no stone unturned’. But Brian Leishman, who was elected as the new Labour MP for Alloa and Grangemouth in 2024, was suspended from the Parliamentary Labour Party in July this year after demanding that the government fulfil its ...”

“... 1965, opening with that lone staccato snare-shot which heralds the raw power of ‘Like a Rolling Stone’ and ending 51 exhausting minutes later with the bleak dream vignettes of ‘Desolation Row’. Then a few months later came the altogether more baroque double album Blonde on Blonde, with its crepuscular, druggy ambience, its cast of eccentric ...”

“... of time they spent together, their way of finishing each other’s sentences. In the words of Brian Basham, a PR man who had worked for them, ‘they were Tweedledum and Tweedledee.’ Philip Green put it more bluntly: after meeting them for the first time, he reportedly described them as ‘fucking weirdos’.The Ellerman deal, Martinson writes, ‘took ...”

“... Union; put another way, in the partisan words of George Robertson, it would ‘kill nationalism stone-dead’. However, others begged to differ. Not only the Tories, but also Labour’s open devo-sceptic, Tam Dalyell, contended that home rule and the resulting potential for friction between Edinburgh and Westminster would only fuel nationalist ...”

“... being. The mission statement, in Latin, was sealed in parchment and buried next to the foundation stone. In future myth attributed to the progenitor of the EU, Jean Monnet, it was actually written by Marcel Decombis, a member of his cabinet. In English it runs: In this school building children from Germany, Belgium, France, Italy, Luxembourg and the ...”

“... tacked to the fridge. Even in Natural Born Killers, written by Tarantino and directed by Oliver Stone in 1994, which is by far the most brutal of these movies, the violence mainly suggests that everyone and everything is out of control, that no rules apply, and chaos is come again. What interests Tarantino, it seems, is not violence, but fiasco, the sense ...”

“... people in Britain? Are they lost in nostalgic ‘Celtic mists’? Are they silver-tongued, Blarney Stone-kissers who have taken in the gullible Yanks? Those we interviewed, the ones I’ve spoken to since, displayed varying levels of knowledge and interest. Some had strong pro-Republican opinions without being too clear about the facts; others with equally ...”

“... the Americans arrived (Schöneberg was in the American sector). Rubble was cleared, the remaining stone-carved grapes were plucked off the façades of the buildings, and the 12-foot ceilings were lowered. The street was no longer home to professors and lawyers but to a ‘railway conductor, a seamstress, a house painter, a lathe operator, a panel beater, a ...”

“... When a literary magazine is as good as this one it hurts to throw old copies away. Visiting I.F. Stone once in Washington, I was impressed by his complete bound files of the New York Review of Books, and more impressed still that he had extracted these from the editor as part-payment. Perhaps contributors to the LRB could work the same trick on Karl ...”

“... upper-middle class, in fact. Ann Thwaite points out that the tyrannically aristocratic Sir Brian Botany, in Now we are six, is humiliated by his social inferiors, and comforted after his discomfiture by finding his right level as ‘plain Mr Botany, B’. The strange thing about the popularity of Milne’s children’s books is the obviously reassuring ...”

“... John Lennon gave his famous interview to Jann Wenner of Rolling Stone magazine at the end of 1970, a few days before the release of the most important solo-Beatle record, John Lennon/Plastic Ono Band. Rolling Stone published the interview early the following year, with the album already in the shops ...”

“... the referendum of 1997, was supposed to strengthen the union by killing nationalism in Scotland ‘stone dead’, in the words of the Labour politician George Robertson. Under the Additional Member System introduced for elections to the Scottish Parliament, regional list MSPs are elected on a formula designed to correct the unrepresentative results which arise ...”