“... with prizes for the films, including the Palme d’Or and the Grand Prix at Cannes; Emily Watson was nominated for an Oscar for her performance as Bess in Breaking the Waves. The question that arises is how these blood-stained women fit in with von Trier’s rallying of the avant-garde: whether they say something complex and radical about the human ...”

“... hydrofoil to Macao in order to see the temples and the villas and the colonial cafés which Tony Watson-Gandy must have seen when he lived there, just after the war, with a Chinese boyfriend and pipes of opium, studying Mandarin. A sudden rush of identification led me, for the length of an afternoon and for the only time in my life, to think boys as ...”

“... and had taken to shoemaking with little success. The defiant James Ings was a butcher. Dr James Watson was an apothecary who happened to be in debtors’ prison when the conspiracy erupted and so escaped arrest and trial. He had been an ingenious armourer for the plot, devising letter bombs and smoke bombs and also secret codes, which, alas, were cracked as ...”

“... the best way to catch a powerful patron’s eye was not to wait to be asked. In 1785, Caroline Watson was appointed ‘Engraver to the Queen’, a new office, on the basis of having designed and published an unsolicited image of Queen Charlotte’s daughter, Princess Mary.The most commercially savvy female artists, including the history painter Angelica ...”

“... The war​ rescued my father, Peter Raban, from his first job as a probationary teacher in the West Midlands and restored him to his proper station as an officer and a gentleman. He had hoped to go on to university (Oxford or Cambridge) from his boarding school in Worcester but his dismal Higher School Certificate results nixed that ambition ...”

“... pointed out, this arrangement is almost bound to have socially regressive effects. Brown quotes Peter Scott, the former vice-chancellor of Kingston University: ‘To rely on A-level grades alone is, in effect, further to privilege the already privileged, to give disproportionate rewards to those whose way in life has been smooth. The correlation between ...”

“... the London Waste Ltd plant in particular, was investigated by the television journalist Richard Watson for Newsnight. A predictable story of fudging, economy with the truth, buck-passing and ministerial denial. Until August 2000, London Waste was guilty of mixing relatively safe bottom ash with the contaminated fly ash that the process was introduced to ...”

“... of the best sources for Bacon’s thinking in these years is the diary of his cousin Diana Watson, who saw him regularly in London. ‘At tea,’ she wrote, Bacon ‘said he could not get away from the Crucifixion idea – that he never really wanted to do anything else’. She referred to it as his ‘frightful Crucifixion complex’. His only ...”