“... he’s crippled by survivor’s guilt, a feeling intensified by the closeness of the filial bond: in his mind, he and his father are ‘indistinguishable’. In Anatomy of a Disappearance, the son, Nuri, is a little older, 14, when the father, Kamal, an Egyptian, goes missing in Geneva in 1972, the victim of a kidnapping: ‘How could I have not ...”

“... with the Hilldebeest! The Many-Horned Hillaria! (Bernie who?) Hellza-poppin’ H-Rod! (Not the Donald?) The Grinch Who Lost Her Emails! The Ethical Wreck! Our Straight-Talking-Thick-Ankled Lady of the Half-Explained! (Will Huma be there?) OMGoddess! It should be awesome, we figure: our first sighting, not only of the She-Deity, but also of her millionaire ...”

“... embryo of a new world governed by atavistic fears, whose most malign symptom is the presidency of Donald Trump. Pfeffer, a correspondent for Haaretz, has written a biography of Benjamin Netanyahu as a way of explaining today’s Israel – by no means an enviable task. Say what you will about Netanyahu’s predecessors, they had their fascination, from the ...”

“... would not have been mentioned to the pupils of the primary school in Câmpina which my father, Donald Slomnicki, then seven and speaking only a smattering of Romanian, attended from the autumn of 1938. Behind every teacher in every classroom in every school loomed a portrait of the king and a map of Greater Romania, the perfect circle within ...”

“... of EU finance ministers to press his agenda. The list included emergency bailout loans, ECB bond purchases, bank funding, quantitative easing, eurobonds and Eurozone equivalents to US bank resolution and deposit insurance mechanisms. The US Treasury line was backed by the German SPD and Greens, the financial press and the world media. In May 2010 the ...”

“... agreeing the daughter should never have been born.And yet, despite the rain of insults, the bond persists. When Geof, scandalised, tries to intervene, mother and daughter tell him to butt out: they will never let anyone criticise the other or sell them short. ‘Nobody asked you to come,’ Helen says to Peter when he insults Jo; ‘that’s the way to ...”

“... like to relax by getting themselves dominated in bed. Describing her non-consensual encounter with Donald Trump in a department store fitting room, E. Jean Carroll refused even to use the word ‘rape’. ‘I think most people think of rape as being sexy.’ Even writing about sexual violence is a kind of complicity. You must have the fantasy in order to ...”

“... owes its swift ascent to Modi, who audaciously clarified the quid pro quo. Under the ‘electoral bond’ scheme he introduced in 2017, any business or special interest group can give unlimited sums of money to his party and keep the transaction hidden from public scrutiny.Modi ensures his hegemony by forging a public sphere where sycophancy is rewarded and ...”

“... beliefs about their educational system. It is claimed that in the 18th and 19th centuries it was a bond, with all social classes using the parish school, and at the same time a source of social mobility so far as it enabled the ‘lad o’ pairts’, the bright boy from a humble home, to move upwards to middle-class status and a professional career. The two ...”

“... sapping cliché hung in the air: she was ‘in the shadow’ of her sister (no matter that their bond seems to have remained secure). One website sneered that the Jay-Z contretemps was probably her ‘greatest hit’. All this changed in autumn 2016 when Solange released A Seat at the Table. A Seat at the Table is at the heart of Stephanie Phillips’s Why ...”

“... public revenue for productive investment and tamp down the inflationary pressures that scared the bond managers of multinational banks, while the normalisation of international relations would open the USSR, Eastern Europe and China for trade and investment. But normalisation failed to solve the crisis of Keynesianism – China was a basketcase, while the ...”

“... the authoritarian danger does resemble that of the 1930s in Europe. Trump believes that a unitary bond links him to the real people. He is their voice. And Republican moderates have almost extinguished themselves as a political species. Though party grandees as various as McCain, Romney, G.W. and Jeb Bush declined to support Trump against Clinton in 2016, and ...”

“... dies. Best known, I suppose, for the Henry Root letters, back in 1961 Willie, in partnership with Donald Albery, put on Beyond the Fringe. A deceptively gentle and kindly figure Willie was never condescending as Albery invariably was and seemed as much at sea in the world of show business as we were. By the time he came into our lives and though he was not ...”

“... busted many of Dahl’s many self-mythologisations) and the huge ‘official’ one by Donald Sturrock, which, while seeking to bring out the best in Dahl, doesn’t conceal his self-aggrandising side.Through the mid-1960s Dahl wrote film scripts, variously hacked about and supplemented by other hands, including the screenplay for the ...”

“... Marques during the war? Perhaps Cyril Connolly said the last word on the spy story when in ‘Bond strikes camp’ he pictured 007 being nearly seduced by a C monstrously attired in drag. The spy story continues to flourish, but no longer do upper-class heroes outwit von Stumm and Hilda von Einem as they did in Greenmantle. Giles Railton, the hero of John ...”