“... around here, outposts of partiality. Coagh, with its red, white and blue kerbstones, has a Union Jack with ‘No Surrender’ emblazoned on it on the side of the public toilets, but a mile or two further on Irish tricolours fly from telephone poles with Sinn Féin election posters nailed to them. Mickey has a builder’s rough hands and a young face. He is ...”

“... from all over southern England crammed together shoulder to shoulder without face masks in Central London, in defiance of the rules against large gatherings, would seem a display of selfishness provocative enough to justify its being broken up by the police. But what is democracy without political protest? And it was a genuine political protest. It was an ...”

“... experienced vaudeville stars in Hollywood in the form of the Scarecrow (Ray Bolger), the Tin Man (Jack Haley) and the Cowardly Lion (Bert Lahr). The film lasts 101 minutes and Garland is on screen for all but five. If we had nothing to go on but The Wizard of Oz, it would be hard to disagree with Brogan’s thesis that ‘MGM was the best possible place for ...”

“... was allowed to surface. His ‘Feel Flows’ and ‘Long Promised Road’ (co-written with Jack Rieley) are two of the loveliest songs on Surf’s Up.The relationship between Brian and Dennis is harder to read. Dennis was handsome, feckless, the genuine article: a leonine surfer and hot rodder. He acted in Monte Hellman’s terrific film Two-Lane ...”

“... on Nato’s war on Yugoslavia, still a touchstone of bien-pensant sensibility in Paris as in London. Perhaps in self-absolution, Debray has since compromised himself by preparing the ground for the Franco-American coup in Haiti. But the establishment can scarcely count on him.A comparable case is France’s most incisive jurist, Alain Supiot. Drawing on ...”

“... as it stayed an available medium for rehearsed entertainment; to find parts in the theatre, in London as well as New York; to act in French and Italian movies; and to appear on talk shows, where he was a great and good holder-forth. Any two minutes of him were apt to bring out something fresh. People think they know what makes a star, but there isn’t ...”

“... scale of Britain’s dirty money problem is well documented. For more than two decades the ‘London laundromat’ has cleaned kleptocratic cash without fear or favour. Since 2008, when Gordon Brown introduced the Tier 1 ‘golden visa’ scheme, 905 Russian millionaires and their families have come to the UK. The scheme was scrapped on 17 ...”

“... pretence that women in the working world (whether a market in Africa or an office building in London) are really just working frivolously, passing the time, working for silly personal expenditures, working, as Moroccans sneer, for ‘lipstick’. Yet even ‘lipstick’ may be made a job necessity: ‘Continental Airlines in 1991 dismissed a young woman ...”

“... of the friends and kin of the fallen, although there’s plenty of that. A Ukrainian friend in London, originally from Donetsk, was in Kyiv a couple of weeks before I arrived. She noticed that the customers in TSUM, a high-end department store on Khreshchatyk, had changed. ‘The main clients used to be IT guys,’ she said. ‘Now it’s a family shopping ...”

“... us. We never considered the stuff on our plates; we thought the school milk came on a lorry from London. Never for a second did my friends and I think of ourselves as coming from a rural community; like all British suburban kids, we lived as dark, twinkling fallout from a big city, in our case Glasgow; and we thought carports and breezeblocks were part of ...”

“... out. Essentially, it is a nondescript straggle of houses sandwiched uncomfortably between the vast London Valley Brickyard in the Marston Valley on one side, with its hundreds of sulphurous chimneys, and the airfield on the other side, a leftover from the Second World War which has since become a college of aeronautics.When I was a boy, the village reeked of ...”

“... novel The Rotters’ Club.5 The last, and most famous, was the Inklings, with C.S. Lewis (‘Jack’) and Charles Williams, at Oxford in the 1930s. On this subject, Humphrey Carpenter’s 1978 study, The Inklings, last revised in 1997, is the place to start.Religion: Mabel, his widowed mother, was a Roman Catholic convert, and Tolkien at least believed ...”