“... diatribe against Brussels, he told Cameron: ‘I think it will be a disaster if we leave. I may even have to relocate some of my businesses to be inside the EU.’ Cameron has some regrets about what happened next: It has been reported that I went on to ask him to sack Paul Dacre. Frankly, I wish I had – and I wish it had happened. I suspect he does ...”

“... 29 May. Everyone I know is obsessed with Roy Keane’s tournament-ending public diatribe against the Ireland manager, Mick McCarthy. ‘Who the fuck do you think you are, having meetings about me? You were a crap player, you are a crap manager. The only reason I have any dealings with you is that somehow you are manager of my country and you’re not even Irish, you English cunt ...”

“... was to overwhelm ‘the fire-extinguishing appliances of the community’, after which ‘the city may be destroyed in toto.’ Lanchester also came up with the idea of deterrence, predicting that, where bombing was concerned, the ‘threat of reprisal’ would always be more effective than ‘pseudo-legal’ prohibition under international law. The Zeppelins ...”

“... and a few of de Acosta’s quite staggeringly awful plays one is tempted to demur. Seductive she may have been – Pola Negri? Isadora? Garbo and Dietrich? – but also dumb, spoiled, a headcase, and in the end oddly tedious. Once she got past one’s defences, Cuban heels a-clicking, she seems rapidly to have palled. I guess that’s the problem with ...”

“... I please him any more? Or am I not a good housewife? Haven’t I borne him a son and a daughter, may God have mercy on her? What’s wrong with me that he should marry on top of me?’ ‘There’s nothing wrong with you, child, and a thousand men would desire you. But these things are in the hands of God. Doesn’t the Koran say: “and you ...”

“... Mossocks. Across his career Garner has shown an aversion to setting the scene, but in this case it may be a shrewd move. Young readers can impose their own preference, or let the protagonists be the same age without the technicality of twinhood. It’s revealed late in the book that Colin is the taller by an inch, which could mean anything. There’s the ...”

“... on the floor of his sickroom. The mess is a visible rejection of any proprietary claims that may be made on his life or his work by housekeepers or critics – versions, he would suppose, of the same thing. ‘There is all sorts of debris scattered about – bits of manuscript, letters, newspapers, books,’ Traubel writes of Whitman’s room early on in ...”

“... a contingency plan’ for Pakistan to react ‘immediately’. Returning to Pakistan on 20 May, she called for a government of national unity. Two days later she was leading marches demanding instant nuclear tests or Sharif’s resignation. The glass bracelets worn by South Asian women symbolise effeminacy and cowardice in this macho culture. Benazir ...”

“... the secrets of the Thatcher Government were dragged into the public domain with a haste which some may call unseemly but which a contemporary historian can hardly be expected to deplore. First, in 1992, Lawson produced The View from No. 11. It was a cogent defence of his stewardship, exhibiting his expertise as an old financial journalist (though he celebrated ...”

“... confirms the ‘pinched, parsimonious quality’ of British attitudes in Eritrea, though it may have been an oversight, rather than a slight, on the part of an expatriate administrative force who knew they would be posted elsewhere before long. Eritrea, a settler project for the Italians, was for the British merely a brief and tiresome tour of ...”

“... on Modern Poetry (1938) that ‘literary criticism should always be partly biographical.’ This may be theoretically unsound, but it springs from something he knew about his own creativity. Yet his strength was not self-disclosure. Although he never subscribed to the Modernist cult of impersonality, he rejected the idea that poetry is self-expression and ...”

“... my head up high and say that now it is sorted’.The Infected Blood Inquiry, announced by Theresa May in 2017, began proceedings the following year. It has now heard oral evidence from more than two hundred people, with many thousands of pages of documents and written submissions, from family members as well as victims. Gary, Colin, Joe and Bob were all born ...”

“... binary sexuation, the existence and structure of the family itself?Just​ as a sex worker may not be able to help but notice the need to ‘feign nonboredom, manage power-laden transactions, regulate enjoyment’ even when spending supposedly free time with the one she loves, so women who have worked as paid surrogates ...”

“... know. Her meagre salary as a New York City schoolteacher ended when she was fired. Mental illness may have been the cause, or maybe not. After that she scratched a living by addressing envelopes at home. In 1948, when Stone was eleven, they moved into a single room in the once comfortable, now decaying Endicott Hotel on New York’s West Side. There was no ...”

“... ravens are omnivorous. Pernicious. Monogamous. I’m interested in monogamous. I got married last May and had my honeymoon in Stykkishólmur. This year I returned to Stykkishólmur to live with my husband for three months in one small room. This extreme monogamy proved almost too much for us. Rather than murder each other we rented a second place (Greta’s ...”