“... mapped networks and amassed evidence. In 2021 he brought down the billionaire New York collector Michael Steinhardt, a hedge fund manager also accused of sexual harassment by several women, who admitted that buying risky objects was ‘like an addiction’. Bogdanos raided his Fifth Avenue apartment and seized 180 stolen objects valued at $70 ...”

“... with the production of the film within the film. It’s presided over by a figure called Mr Roque (Michael J. Anderson), whom Tom McCarthy describes in his essay on Lynch’s ‘Prosthetic Imagination’ as ‘almost pure prosthesis, his already tiny, crippled body dwarfed yet further by the spacious, hi-tech chamber from which … he calls the shots’. The ...”

“... they are oblivious to everything else.’ Normal criminals pick up the separate scent of a six-foot-three plainclothes copper in size eleven shoes, but not the queers: ‘to my mind the stronger and the bigger the man the more interested they are in getting to know the other side of him.’ Once he had a chap who was interested in him: ‘I gave him a ...”

“... become a witness of a black sub-proletariat … and I couldn’t bear that.’ He would never set foot in the US again. But far from discouraging him, staying in France freed him to pursue his cinematic dream of ‘America’ unburdened by reality. He continued to pay tribute to Hollywood films: the screenplay he wrote for Le Samouraï was a barely disguised ...”

“... with swallows skimming low over the tops and it feels like a scene from the 1940s. It could be a Michael Powell film or a page from the diaries of Denton Welch. This isn’t wholly imagination either, as it turns out that there was a camp here during the war for American airborne troops, which makes the survival of these wonderfully elaborate pillars, still ...”

“... just a master of the political dark arts, he claimed he modelled himself on a Tory predecessor, Michael Heseltine, who had pledged to ‘intervene before breakfast, lunch and dinner’ on the side of British industry. But Mandelson never had a chance to put the case. A few weeks after EDF made its move, he was on the brink of tears, listening to Tony Blair ...”

“... left behind were that it should be used in any way possible – short of falling into the hands of Michael Winner – ‘to make money for my boys’: Mark Pearce, her second husband, and Alexander, the couple’s son, born in 1983. As Edmund Gordon says towards the beginning of his biography, Carter was never so widely acclaimed in life as she would be in the ...”

“... in middle age. A few years later, she also agreed to have a biography written by the historian Michael King, who took the approach of telling a ‘compassionate truth’, defined as ‘a presentation of evidence and conclusions that fulfil the major objectives of biography, but without the revelation of information that would involve the living subject in ...”

“... it instead, colliding with the air molecules in its path at a pressure of about 2lb per square foot. The assaulted air shook, and gave up the dose of extra energy as sound. Concorde climbed on, dragging its sack of reverberating noise behind. There is, of course, no such thing as the sound barrier. What there is, is the aerodynamic challenge of the ...”

“... the morning and read in the afternoon. This was the old Coventry Central Library, nestling at the foot of the unbombed cathedral, filled with tall antiquated bookcases (blindstamped Coventry Central Libraries after the fashion of the time) with my ex-schoolfellow Ginger Thompson ... This was my first experience of the addictive excitement a large open-access ...”

“... relationship with the new pope’. The doubts had started early. In 1977, an English Jesuit, Michael Campbell-Johnston, sent to Argentina to report on the order there, wrote that he was appalled that ‘our institute in Buenos Aires was able to function freely because it never criticised or opposed the government,’ and, according to Ivereigh, ‘he ...”

“... was always attached to the same brown brogue, was placed behind a curtain at night, with only the foot showing, to deter intruders); Roger Lloyd had lost an arm (I initially thought that his huge dog, Gozo, so fierce that he had to be housed in a derelict tennis court, had torn it from its socket and eaten it); Robert Crabbe had lost several toes, which I did ...”

“... had to dig down into a stash hidden behind a sofa to show me the trophy he won in 1975. ‘Top 139-foot Trawler’, the plate reads, with the value of the catch engraved down to the last pound: £311,666. As the skipper, Hardie got five per cent, minus five per cent of the cost of the trip – a haul, for three weeks’ work, of perhaps £100,000 in today’s ...”

“... enthusiasm across North Africa from 1952 onwards, putting the champions of Islam on the back foot. But Gaddafi & Co were latecomers to the Arab nationalist revolutionary ball and little more than a year after their seizure of power Nasser was dead. For some time Gaddafi persisted with the idea of a strategic relationship with Egypt, which would have ...”

“... tender. ‘God bless you, my dear son. I pray for you constantly,’ he writes to his first-born, Michael, in 1941. ‘My dearest,’ he addresses his younger son, Christopher, in 1944.What else can we learn from Tolkien’s letters? Well, he loved trees and the English countryside, and hated cars and machinery. He hated France and the French, although he did ...”