“... even ‘classics’ – they were little-regarded films dating from the mid-Fifties, movies which Andrew Sarris, a leading historian of Hollywood, later characterised as ‘widely reviled’ and ‘seldom, if ever, revived’. But there was method in Godard’s madness. The dedication of Breathless to Monogram Pictures, the loving tributes to movies that ...”

“... troubled – took the credit here where it wasn’t entirely due. Her doughty British biographer Andrew Wilson was the first to report that Margot Johnson, Highsmith’s New York agent, had actually engineered the upbeat dénouement, just as the book was on the verge of publication (Johnson thought – correctly – it might improve sales). Wilson’s ...”

“... rebel militias, government forces and semi-autonomous units. There was room for roughly a hundred young people on the property taken over from the Government by Children Associated with War – part of a sprawling, ill-appointed juvenile reform centre at the end of a dirt track some distance from the main road. Nahim and his colleagues were stretched at the ...”

“... 12 February. A shoddy programme about the conviction of Jonathan King for offences against young men dating back twenty-five years and more. While it features some of the police involved, it manages not to ask the pertinent question: if these 15-year-old boys had been 15-year-old girls and romping round in Rolls-Royces even more famous than those of ...”

“... asked Joan Collins if she could ‘borrow’ some of her jewellery (Collins refused). She asked a young Tom Cruise for a diamond tennis bracelet (made up of many identical settings), but Cruise didn’t know what she meant and sent some cash instead. Farrell, however, was in sympathy with what he called Taylor’s ‘appetites’ and bought her a diamond ...”

“... clarified alarmingly the discourse around the question of homosexuality in the years we were too young to know much about it; by the time the Sexual Offences Act is passed, at the end of his second volume, we were thirteen. I know I was alert by then to the word ‘homosexual’ as it appeared in headlines, and disturbed by this bold-faced naming of a ...”

“... them for it in A Drunk Man Looks at the Thistle: And O! to think that there are members o’ St Andrew’s Societies sleepin’ soon, Wha tae the papers wrote afore they bedded On regimental buttons or buckled shoon, Or use o’ England where the UK’s meent. The Conservatives want to go on believing that political union is essential at once to the ...”

“... the movement’s leaders, Richard Cobden and John Bright, gave encouragement to a proposal by a young Scotsman, James Wilson, to set up a weekly newspaper that would argue for the cause of free trade. But Wilson had no intention of being a mouthpiece for the Anti-Corn Law League, insisting that his paper should be an independent voice. Launched in August ...”

“... announced its fifth interest rate rise since December, to 1.25 per cent. At the end of June, Andrew Bailey, the governor of the bank, admitted that inflation in the UK – triggered by a combination of war in Ukraine and supply-chain bottlenecks in the wake of Covid lockdowns – is likely to endure for longer than in the United States or mainland ...”

“... Twenty​ years ago, Andrew Motion, one of Philip Larkin’s literary executors, wrote a scholarly and comprehensive authorised biography of the poet, whom he had known well; it was subtitled ‘A Writer’s Life’. Motion informed his readers that some important ingredients of Larkin’s life were still unavailable, especially most of the letters written to Monica Jones, a lecturer at the University of Leicester, who was his closest companion and lover, but never wife ...”

“... Caribbean well, and had visited the Panama region; Paterson himself had been in the Caribbean when young, though not in Darien. None of this seemed to count. Hope was what mattered. Paterson sold the Darien mirage to the company of Scotland, and the company sold it to the Scottish investors. The scheme had to succeed. In many Scottish minds, it had already ...”

“... for heroic gestures that evoked bygone eras of aristocratic grandeur. On a tour of England as a young man, a ride to Warwick Castle had left him in a state of Gothic rapture: ‘Imagine,’ he wrote to his wife, Mary, ‘a light breeze, a cloudless sky, a full moon; add to this a fiery and agile horse between my thighs, centuries of chivalry in my head, and ...”

“... had limited success, Britain’s more telling contribution to wartime strategy emerged in 1855. As Andrew Lambert has shown, it focused on the Baltic, and aimed to use British naval strength to exploit Russian economic weakness. Britain had the naval power to blockade and bombard ports, immobilising enemy fleets and imposing huge economic pressure. Its overt ...”

“... Democrats. In Haywire, his steely account of Britain’s backfiring start to the new millennium, Andrew Hindmoor suggests that Cameron’s announcement was intended as a sop to those on the right of his party who were agitating against his plan to introduce gay marriage (when it came to a vote, nearly half the parliamentary party anyhow opposed the bill, and ...”

“... into the scope of ‘immoral conditions’ in the local community. They recruited from among the young enlisted men stationed at the base a number of sailors who volunteered to serve as decoys and to seek out and identify men they suspected of being sexual perverts. The volunteers agreed to have sex with these men, to infiltrate their social networks, and by ...”