“... had been boiled alive to produce it. Craig Murray records his astonishment on being recalled to London to be told that the foreign secretary, Jack Straw, and Sir Richard Dearlove, the head of MI6, had decided that in the ‘War on Terror’ we should, as a matter of policy, use intelligence obtained through torture by ...”

“... arithmetic. Racism did not need genealogy. The marriage of the world heavyweight boxing champion Jack Johnson – unquestionably Black – to two white women in succession prompted a Georgia congressman in 1912 to argue for a constitutional amendment banning such marriages. There were race riots all over the country when Johnson defeated James J. Jeffries ...”

“... Dan Jacobson, after all, is a distinguished professor emeritus of English at University College London, who has written many novels, critical works and now a compelling, funny and honest travelogue in search of his roots. Rabbi Heshel would not have been impressed, however. He had a terrible row with his wife when he discovered that, during his absence in ...”

“... theorist Laura Mulvey, I found myself in the company of another critic, who had just returned to London from the Berlin Film Festival. Over dinner he took pleasure in regaling us with stories of the male to female transsexual prostitutes he had met on the city’s streets, and how difficult it was to ‘complete’ the transaction since the transsexual body ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... Novel in Late Capitalist Globalisation – which track the translation of cultural capital from London to Dublin and New York, and the emergence of a globalised fiction in which America is a base.‘Flann O’Brien was right,’ Deane says at the start of ‘Emergency Aesthetics’. ‘Joyce was invented by Americans. He was part of their foreign policy, of ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... I remember how comedians only appeared in Film and Radio Fun long after their vogue had passed. Jack Warner with his catchphrase ‘Mind my bike’ and Joe E. Brown were known to me only as personalities from the comics not from the medium which had originally made them famous. I suppose this might be taken as an extension of the Hegelian doctrine that the ...”

“... with a hoax, it ends even less encouragingly. The last entry, in terms of date of death, is Sir Jack Jacob (1908-2000, ‘barrister and jurist’), who died on 26 December 2000, but the last to be born are, soberingly, Stephen Adrian Lawrence (1974-93, ‘murder victim’) and James Patrick Bulger (1990-93, ‘murder victim’). And so ends the 20th ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... box before making his way slowly round the touchline under a hail of missiles, fingering the Union Jack corner flag as a parting gesture. After the game, which England won via a Hurst header, Alf Ramsey attempted to prevent the usual shirt-swap and then uttered the comment that would caption England’s relationship with South American sides for ...”

“... 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 ...”