“... their conversation. The tape became the most important single piece of evidence in the phone hacking trial that has just come to an end. Blunkett avoided confirming Coulson’s story, saying that he was entitled to a private life. But he had a question of his own: how did Coulson know he was having an affair? ‘People do talk,’ Coulson said. He ...”

“... Western societies. If Hélène Smith were alive today she would undoubtedly be classified, pace Ian Hacking, as a ‘multiple’ – with Léopold, Simandini, Marie Antoinette and the rest as secondary personalities actualised by some mysterious concatenation of intrapsychic causes. But Flournoy is also in some degree the villain of the piece: an ...”

“... never anything more than a local theory, whose fate is tied to a ‘transient mental illness’ (Ian Hacking) corresponding to very specific cultural and historical conditions? Mitchell’s revisionist theory attempts to address this objection, by recentring the discussion on Freud’s self-analysis: yes, hysteria may well have disappeared from the ...”

“... of undiluted naivety. The use of statistics in 19th-century legal medicine is an outgrowth of what Ian Hacking has called the ‘avalanche of printed numbers’.4 This employment of statistical evidence and categorisation raises intricate epistemological and political issues that do not even enter Masson’s field of vision. The second chapter of his ...”

“... every problem just by declaring her intention to solve it. She cannot see a Gordian knot without hacking at it with her nail-scissors. If anyone seriously wanted to put a little flesh on the theory that there is such a thing as a New Britain, in contrast with a Worsthornian Old Britain, Mrs Thatcher’s adoption of the poll tax as the ultimate weapon in her ...”

“... Buddhist sculpture, before they enter the profane world of the magazine. The current Eye editor, Ian Hislop, has a passing resemblance to a small eastern deity, but even so it’s something of a lurch from this hall full of serene statuary, including the head of a 13th-century Buddha carved from sandstone, to a Scarfe cartoon of Harold Wilson with his ...”

“... deep eaves. In 1957 a furious gale ripped off almost fifty roofs. The young architectural critic Ian Nairn, until recently a bomber pilot in the RAF, pointed out that the geometry of the design had acted as an aerofoil (but he liked it). Brett later complained that this disaster was all anyone remembered of his architectural career. Ironically, the Building ...”

“... a degree thinking, the same kind of thoughts as the politicians who are likely to appoint you.’ Ian Blair, Met commissioner between 2005 and 2008, wrote in his memoirs that politicians want the police to be ‘street butlers’, called on ‘when required and invisible the rest of the time’. The commissioner is accountable to both the mayor of London and ...”

“... the pitch, some clapped-out Third Division football side wanly attempting to avoid relegation by hacking at its opponents’ ankles. The discrepancy is of that order. The ethical point is not just relevant but crucial, because it is to the principled editor, the worrier, that the talented contributors come in search of prestige. As editor of a literary ...”

“... police and the press, have fared less well. This side of the Stephen Lawrence case and the phone-hacking trials neither has the same level of credibility they enjoyed in the 1970s.Born in 1934, Lucan would have been, or just possibly was, eighty in 2014. The second child and eldest son of George Charles Patrick (‘Pat’) Bingham, the sixth earl, and his ...”

“... order of rights and institutional autonomy. Within each of these ethnic-territorial units, Ian Bremner writes in the Introduction to the very useful collection he has edited with Ray Taras, institutions were set up identically, with replications of not only party but also cultural, scientific and educational facilities. Economic policy also appeared ...”

“... a robbery at the London Electricity Board in Ilford was unsafe. New graffiti tell the world that Ian Tomlinson, an unfortunate pedestrian caught up in the G20 protests in the City, was murdered by the police. The calligraphy is elegant, the punctuation emphatic. A strange and rather Ackroydian incident occurred as I walked past the railings of St John the ...”

“... Baths. The foundation stone was laid on 18 March 1903. The official opening was on 25 June 1904. Ian Gordon and Simon Inglis’s book Great Lengths: The Historic Indoor Swimming Pools of Britain tells us that E.J. Wakeling, vice chairman of the Shoreditch Baths and Washhouses Committee, animated the occasion by plunging into the pool and swimming a 100-foot ...”

“... him – its editor, Alan Rusbridger, showed concern for his position, as did the then deputy, Ian Katz, and others – but he talked about its journalists in savage terms. The Guardian felt strongly that the secret material ought to be redacted to protect informants or bystanders named in it, and Julian was inconsistent about that. I never believed he ...”

“... Aitken, who ended up being jailed for perjury, to Nick Davies’s exposure of tabloid phone-hacking, which led to the closure of the News of the World. For Rusbridger the culmination of his editorship was the Guardian’s role in the revelation in 2013 of industrial-scale spying by Western intelligence agencies on their own citizens, thanks to Edward ...”