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“... off the west of Ireland. A fair number of Scots manned the ship during the closing months of 1940: Ian Affleck used to work in Kalac’s Cycle and Motor Store in Forfar, and felt he’d been born to help power a ship such as this, named after his own town. Angus McInnes’s father had been a fisherman on the Isle of Harris; Angus had sailed with Forfar since ...”

“... not all this blasted cooking and eating (and washing up!)Duck, in fact, seems often to have been a bone of contention. In a letter the previous year he again apologises for an outburst, and attempts to explain, perhaps more for his own benefit than for that of Eva, what the ‘psychiatrist’ he mentions here might have described as ‘unresolved ...”

“... about kings and queens is as voracious as ever. In the past couple of decades authors such as Ian Mortimer and Alison Weir have been bashing out books at a furious pace, including The Perfect King (yes, it was Edward III) and Queens of the Age of Chivalry. In the last few years, publishers have jumped on the Game of Thrones bandwagon, peddling titles such ...”

“... Woman.15 April. Watch five minutes of Have I Got News for You with Nigel Farage the guest and Ian Hislop and Paul Merton their usual genial selves. I never quite understand why they are happy to sit on a panel with the likes of Farage, Boris Johnson, Jeremy Clarkson et al. Their reasoning would, I imagine, be that this gives them the opportunity to have ...”

“... about the battle-readiness of the National Coal Board and the flakiness of its imported chief, Ian MacGregor, she resisted the impulse to take charge. She allowed herself to be persuaded by her cabinet secretary, Robin Butler, that it was too dangerous for the prime minister’s office to appear to be setting the terms of the dispute. She remained reliant ...”

“... to import soya as a protein source for our pigs now because we can’t use other animal meat or bone fat. But this country imports tons of Dutch and Danish meat fed on bone fat.’As we walked out of the living-room I noticed there were no pictures on any of the walls. We went outside to the pigsties. The rain was pouring ...”

“... we do not notice the acoustic footprints of the city, the sighs and grunts of the trains, or the bone-shuddering din of the guardians in the sky. ‘They do use sound as a weapon,’ Sandhu says. But what do the helicopter jockeys see that is available only to an avian elite? ‘You can see everyone’s swimming pools.’ The Shangri-La pool, about the size ...”

“... Sons: The Story of Iran’s Boy Soldiers, written shortly after the end of the war by a Briton, Ian Brown. I was struck by one account, a basiji’s recollection of his baptism of fire, at the age of 13. After only a month’s training at a camp near Khorramshahr I was sent to the front. When we arrived we all assembled in a field where there must have ...”

“... your head athwart my hips and gently turned over upon me, And parted the shirt from my bosom-bone, and plunged your tongue to my bare-strip’t heart, And reach’d till you felt my beard, and reach’d till you held my feet. Matthiessen’s commentary is vaguely disapproving of the tone of this passage. ‘In the passivity of the poet’s body,’ he ...”

“... by how ‘poetic’ it all is – their fierce quarrels and affections and all the fish, blood and bone of the verse. If there had been jokes, I suppose, the spell might have been broken. 2 April. Remember the device advertised in comics sixty years or so ago and called, I think, a Seebackroscope. It was a small funnel in black Bakelite containing a tilted ...”

“... Dementia in men of twenty: brains that shrank and withered. Tuberculosis of the stomach, of the bone marrow. A cancer meant to be slow-moving, to manifest benignly in elderly men from the Mediterranean, which burrowed from the outside in: from marks on the skin, to the stomach and lungs. Non-human illnesses: men dying from the blights of sheep, of birds, of ...”

“... dull that it nauseated me’. But the imaginative arts lined up to pay tribute. In Cambridge, Ian McEwan and A.S. Byatt spoke about their ‘literary relationship with Darwin’. The joint Yale-Cambridge museum homage, Endless Forms: Charles Darwin, Natural Science and the Visual Arts (at the Fitzwilliam in Cambridge and the Yale Center for British ...”

“... specialists in survival by bending low. Lacking any elites of mettle, this was a nation without a bone in its body. Sartori was not talking at random. His addressees were the political class he described. By this time, the PCI was gone, Berlusconi was in power and his central objectives were clear: to protect himself and his empire from the law. The ad ...”

“... We are dealing with a vicious injunction and a Sisyphean task. You will enact honour in every bone of your body and every minute of your life because, as a woman, you are the one who carries the seeds of its destruction. No matter then that a woman is born pure, she is also judged before she breathes. Mehmet Mirza, another of Onal’s subjects, taught his ...”

“... from far away, except that these ‘outsiders’ were born far away in time, rather than space. Ian McEwan openly expressed the motif last year when he looked forward to a more liberal future Britain in 2019, cleansed of ‘1.5 million oldsters, mostly Brexiters, freshly in their graves’. It’s odd, and not just because McEwan, at 69, isn’t exactly a ...”