“... forgotten it. Anyway, it seems fanciful but isn’t.1 October. Saddened by the death of the actor Ben Whitrow. A bookman, favourite and correspondent of Patrick Garland, he collected the books and articles of Denton Welch besides being a subtle and elegant actor who, as Olivier said, had never given a bad performance. He had written to me recently, delicately ...”

“... following Elizabeth’s death in 1861 Browning grew into a sage, with poems such as ‘Rabbi Ben Ezra’ (‘Then, welcome each rebuff/That turns earth’s smoothness rough’) apparently bringing comfort to the troubled intelligentsia. His sometimes blustering good cheer spoke with special eloquence to the serious Victorians who formed the Browning ...”

“... relationship between Eleanor and Franklin. We get the joke when Franklin, giving Eleanor a bust of Ben Franklin for the bedroom she does not share with him, teases: ‘You can always say I have Franklin with me.’ In the absence of a sexual connection to Eleanor, Franklin makes her his legs, ‘eyes and ears’ around the country; she makes him listen to the ...”

“... the late-explainers call it. No flimflam. Don’t wink at the camera until the camera winks back. Ben Watson, a contributor, like Perloff, to Removed for Further Study (a clutch of bright-eyed and slightly foxed Raworth exegetists, decent folk who are well aware that they are probably talking to themselves), fingers Raworth as ‘a teddy-boy ...”

“... which could destabilise Eastern Europe and resurrect Cold War hostilities. In 1998, John Lewis Gaddis bemoaned that the decision to admit Poland, Hungary and the Czech Republic was taken with almost no public debate and that ‘with remarkably few exceptions’ historians saw it as ‘ill-conceived, ill-timed and above all ill-suited to the realities ...”

“... subplot, he also involved himself intimately in the quarrel between Chaim Weizmann and David Ben-Gurion over the project of a Jewish National Home, and in the attempts by both to play off the British against the Americans. And, though he showed himself able to take risks in leaking classified material that favoured the Zionist cause, he also found ...”

“... got into the black. In What It Takes (1992), a breathless work of campaign stenography, Richard Ben Cramer described the confession Biden made to his aides before deciding to run: ‘The debts – he went through his finances whole, the mortgages, the credit cards. He was into Visa, Amex for thousands.’The letter to his tenants appears in Biden’s 2007 ...”

“... apropos of this whether hunting the spies would have taken the same turn if it had not been for Lewis Namier. His work on the 18th-century Parliament pioneered the study of friendship and connection as the building blocks of 18th-century Parliamentary politics, a method that was quickly taken up and adapted for other periods, the 14th and 15th centuries ...”

“... studio. (‘Interesting, yes,’ Clark said. ‘What extraordinary times we live in.’) In 1945, Ben Nicholson pulled out of a planned six-artist show and Sutherland proposed that Bacon, who was quite unknown, should replace him: ‘I should really prefer Francis Bacon for whose work you know I have a really profound admiration … his recent things, while ...”

“... profit from the pain of those seeking answers about what happened to their loved ones,’ Brandon Lewis, then Northern Ireland secretary, wrote as he shepherded the bill through Parliament. ‘This feeds a pernicious and distorted view of the past, promoted and peddled by those with a vested interest in presenting the British state as the aggressor … We ...”

“... into one of his stores in Kendal (30 tubs of English Lakes ice cream are sold for every one of Ben & Jerry’s). He’s committed to the model of competitive retail, and defends his corner of the industry: it isn’t just the supermarkets driving hard bargains with producers; a handful of ‘intermediaries’ – big wholesalers and food processing giants ...”

“... work’. When Iseult began to share a flat with the highly unsuitable mistress of Wyndham Lewis, both Yeats and George arrived from Dublin and swooped on the place, as though they were her parents, and removed Iseult, Josephine her maid, her cat, her birds and her furniture to more decent quarters. George was less than two years older than her. Taking ...”

“... sleeper agent, groomed to assassinate the presidential nominee at the convention. But Major Ben Marco, a former member of his army unit, breaks through his brainwashing and so instead of murdering the nominee, Shaw shoots his mother, who had been controlling him throughout, along with his idiotic stepfather. Decades later, Condon explained the ...”

“... break it, but only ‘in a specific and limited way’, as the Northern Ireland secretary, Brandon Lewis, assured Parliament. This strengthened the impression of the party’s newfound scepticism about domestic law (when the Supreme Court declared the 2019 prorogation illegal, Kwasi Kwarteng, a member of cabinet, announced on TV: ‘I’m not saying this, but ...”

“... soldiers with bulldozers. Both people and livestock were coming, I was told, from a village called Ben Suc, a long-time VC stronghold which had just been taken by the US 1st/26th Infantry, airlifted into action in sixty helicopters. The people were leaving because their village was to be burned down. The day passed in a blur, jump-cutting from scene to ...”