“... letters ‘please’ and – back to big letters again – ‘mr shaw.’ This is a reference to Chris Shaw, Tewkesbury Borough Council’s director of planning. Pavey, an activist in the Severn and Avon Valley Combined Flood Group, a band of concerned citizens who believe that flooded Tewkesbury was the victim of a greedy, callous government, is one of ...”

“... year’s Oscars ceremony is remembered for just such a reaction chain. When the host, the comedian Chris Rock, made a joke about Jada Pinkett Smith’s shaved head, her husband, Will Smith, strode up on stage and slapped Rock in the face on live television. For several days afterwards, countless commentators, celebrities and social media users sought to ...”

“... not just tourists but prospective residents and second-homers. Cyprus prospered. House prices rose. Ticket prices fell. More visitors, more residents, more houses, more money. First it was people with money seeking homes; then, in a shift that was barely noticeable until after it had happened, it was people seeking a home for their money. Is there some ...”

“... vote (another Jenkins inspiration) likely, it’s thought, to favour Bingham’s chief rival, Chris Patten. At the table I hand in my paper to one of the junior proctors, a weary-looking don who, in what is perhaps a ritual humiliation, demands some evidence of identification. I hand over my Camden bus pass which he scrutinises as grimly as an Albanian ...”

“... her wealth, Taylor had a habit of trying to get gifts out of people; according to one of her sons, Chris Wilding, she could be ‘pretty shameless’ and ‘embarrassing’. She asked Joan Collins if she could ‘borrow’ some of her jewellery (Collins refused). She asked a young Tom Cruise for a diamond tennis bracelet (made up of many identical ...”

“... had seen her do this in a few blurred seconds of CCTV footage – past the MacFish factory and the Rose Line bonded warehouse until they reached the Old Exchange Building.As time went on, I started to ask questions I hadn’t considered before: about the reasons the case hadn’t attracted national attention and had never been reinvestigated. I read that ...”

“... speak.It is hard, without knowing the details of these alleged incidents, to assess whether they rose to the level, as Stock claimed they did, of bullying or harassment. They might have. But there are versions of all these actions, consistent with the way Stock herself has described them, that would be unobjectionable from the perspective of academic ...”

“... in the end, won’t the film consist of taking photographs?’ Perhaps she had touched a nerve: as Chris Marker once pointed out, cinema ‘allowed Godard to be a novelist’. Even after Akerman moves on to her notion of fixed and inscribed images, Godard still wants to catch her out: he chastises her for using a word associated with writing (inscrire) to talk ...”

“... We passed between Sherwood Forest and the River Trent and clusters of steam-headed cooling towers rose on the horizon, signalling the approach to England’s great electric estate. The five coal-fired power stations that spread out in an arc along the Aire and Trent valleys have been there since I was a boy: the squat towers, seen from the window of express ...”

“... at first to distinguish from exhaustion: the MPLA keeled over as one blow followed another, then rose slowly to its feet, helped up by the Cubans and applauded by the Soviet Union. The dictatorship​ of Mobutu Sese Seko in Zaire, which was arming and harbouring Unita and the FNLA, was a more serious threat than Alves. A few weeks before the coup, Neto ...”

“... Thompson, Sanjiv Ahuja, Wolfgang Berndt, Lord Patten and Raymond Viault. Only Berndt replied (Chris Patten’s assistant told me he was in ‘rural Asia’ without email, then, when the deadline was extended, too ill to respond). Berndt told me he couldn’t remember whether the entire board had been asked to sign off on the closure, but remembered that ...”

“... spend the night in a hotel. The judge continued the defendants’ unconditional bail and the court rose. At 10 a.m. the following morning, after he had again spoken of the three defendants’ exemplary character, the judge told the jury he would accept a majority verdict. The jury went out and returned at noon, when the forewoman delivered not guilty verdicts ...”