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“... the efforts of kindly Tommies in winning hearts and minds. Recent studies – for instance, David French’s excellent The British Way in Counter-Insurgency 1945-67 – show that in Malaya, Cyprus, Aden and Kenya British soldiers in fact displayed frequent brutality, often condoned by their officers. In all of Britain’s counterinsurgency ...”

“... seven athletes. Other sports tried to clean up their acts around the same time. The death of Tommy Simpson, the English cyclist whose heart stopped a kilometre from the summit of Mont Ventoux during the 1967 Tour de France, called time on unregulated drug use in professional cycling. Empty packets of amphetamines were found in the pockets of his jersey, and ...”

“... Milk Wood and Beckett’s All That Fall came into being; and drama thrived – the careers of N.F. Simpson, Pinter and Stoppard were nurtured there. Desmond Shawe-Taylor wrote in the New Statesman that ‘the whole musical landscape’ was ‘likely to be transformed by the arrival of the Third Programme’; Edward Sackville-West in Picture Post thought that ...”

“... sense of humour’: a phenomenon everyone considers to be distinctive but no one can define. As David Stubbs writes in Different Times, his impressive survey of British comedy on stage, radio, film and television, ‘it’s not so much a case of Britain producing comedy as comedy producing Britain.’ The book provides a good opportunity to look at our ...”

“... of chuckling over La Vie Parisienne, doubtless introduced into Windsor Castle by her problem son David, Prince of Wales. The Queen disapproved of the Prince of Wales’s liaisons with other men’s wives. At one time she had the curious notion of installing Lord Louis Mountbatten in York House, the Prince’s residence, apparently in order to spread the ...”

“... of female hyenas and, not to leave out our own species, the ‘Shanghai squeeze’ of Wallis Simpson (said to have had ‘the ability to make a matchstick feel like a Havana cigar’, though I always thought that killer fellatio was the talent which deprived the nation of its rightful King). The book is clogged with facts and suppositions taken from ...”

“... was like without the internet’.In an essay on the work of Jean Piaget, the child psychologist David Elkind used the term ‘cognitive alien’ to suggest just how differently very young children see the world – believing, for instance, that the sun and moon follow them as they walk around. For Elkind, the main problem in education is communication: a ...”

“... doctors had shown that smoking increased the risk of lung cancer, and in 1957 an American, W.J. Simpson, had shown that smoking when pregnant might be associated with premature birth. Butler’s study showed that smoking was associated with poorer outcomes for the baby; Harvey Goldstein, the study’s statistician, quit smoking while crunching the data, as ...”

“... Mulholland Drive to The Diary of Anne Frank and Amy Winehouse, from the classical hubris of O.J. Simpson to the collective hubris of ecological disaster. With Freud and the existentialists, tragedy continues to colonise philosophy, as David Kornhaber points out. In a fluid, fragmented culture hostile to boundaries, the ...”

“... in which he attacked the court sycophants who had encouraged Edward VIII’s affair with Wallis Simpson. Invitations to Windsor and Balmoral followed, and he was overjoyed. Ziegler, as biographer of Edward VIII, takes a detailed interest in this side of Osbert’s life, recording its highs and lows with scarcely a flicker of compassion: One of the ...”

“... some mistakes in the book, mostly insignificant. Geyr Von Schweppenburg was not a Field Marshal. Simpson was not Military Secretary or ‘Secretary to the CIGS’: he was Director of Military Operations at the War Office. And the Grenadier Guards did not stop for tea after crossing a Nijmegen bridge already in American hands in September 1944. They ...”

“... nowhere. The story is picked up again in Chapter 52 of Life. Here the student is called Grégoire Simpson, after the insect man in Kafka. In the end he simply disappears, but the chapter concludes movingly with an incident from Simpson’s childhood in which the young boy dresses up in traditional costume to join in a ...”

“... as the daughter of a conservative, Hillary Clinton-hating Catholic priest. She emerged, Lisa Simpson-like, from an upbringing in ‘all the worst cities in the Midwest’, with their bleak glacier-scraped landscapes, where the word ‘toxic’ referred mostly to the abundance of Superfund pollution sites. In the novel, the narrator concludes that she ...”

“... Jewish, too. This discovery brightens Tom up. He now knows he is Jewish. He will wear the Star of David, like that on his Uncle John’s war grave, he will learn Hebrew and support the state of Israel. Tom has, at last, got a general idea, a myth, into his pragmatic head – a tribal and political idea to warm up his bleak sense of duty. Tom is more ...”

“... flight of whimsical fantasy which reminds us that it was fashionable, at that time, to admire N.F. Simpson and his theatre of the suburban absurd. Cook’s ‘Sitting on a Bench’,* in which a delusional tramp informs the audience, in a glazed monotone, that he ‘could have been a judge if he’d had the Latin’, is Beckettian in its bleakness and ...”