“... The Time by the Sea: Aldeburgh 1955-58, an account of years spent with Benjamin Britten, Peter Pears and E.M. Forster on the east coast.) ‘I see by a handbill in the grocer’s shop that a man is going to lecture on the Gorilla in a few weeks,’ said Edward FitzGerald, who lived near Woodbridge. ‘So there is something to look forward ...”

“... that ‘raison d’état can never be humanitarian.’ Zehrer’s prewar writing is discussed in Peter Köpf’s Schreiben nach jeder Richtung (1995) about the postwar West German press. Berghahn, however, doesn’t mention this book, and indeed seems almost completely ignorant of previous work in his field. He fails to overturn the verdict of another ...”

“... into my mind at lunchtime every day for the World at One. Reagan was long gone and Bush was in the White House. He didn’t send me any messages but he had the same initials as the General Belgrano. ‘GB’ was quite common on cars. The drivers would convey me to the president even though he was in Washington and I didn’t have a passport. I knew my ...”

“... farming’. The horrors they witness will come as little surprise to anyone who has read Peter Singer, Michael Pollan, Felicity Lawrence, Eric Schlosser or any of the previous exposés of factory-farmed meat, but they make grim and startling reading even so. If you can get beyond the title, the great virtues of Farmageddon are its global reach and ...”

“... libertarians who admired Margaret Thatcher. In 1989, Orbán, with long hair, stubble and an open white shirt, gave a rousing speech in Heroes’ Square at the reburial of Imre Nagy, the reform socialist who was condemned to death by a Soviet-backed ‘people’s court’ in 1958. What most people remember about the speech is that Orbán told the Russians to ...”

“... a group of waving spectators only to suddenly speed up ‘so all the poor things saw was a pair of white shoes as I was thrown back against the seat & my feet shot into the air’. The various ‘horrid problems’ of Princess Margaret, her love affair with the divorced Peter Townsend, and her perceived reluctance to ...”

“... set the bar for ‘good business’. On 15 and 16 September he bypassed his two major dealers (White Cube and Gagosian) and auctioned 223 pieces of new work directly at Sotheby’s. The sale beat its already sky-high estimates by a substantial margin, bringing a total of £111.5 million, ten times the old record for a single-artist auction, set by Picasso ...”

“... 1936 they had to abandon Chelsea for something more modest. At this low moment Joyce was asked by Peter Fleming, then a leader-writer on the Times, to help enliven the Court Page, whose only light relief from the comings and goings at the Palace was a series of articles about flora and fauna – ‘Woody Plants for Limey Soil’ or ‘Family Cares of the ...”

“... leader. Even when Livingstone left school, in 1962, its population was still overwhelmingly white and monoglot. Cargo ships unloaded at wharves that were only a few hundred yards from the Bank of England, while incoming tides of men crossed London Bridge every morning in bowler hats. Livingstone at first struggled to find a niche for himself in this ...”

“... them risked a violent incident that would be seized on by opponents of the experiment.) A few white coats attest to the presence of nursing staff, but what the images can’t show is that the nurses’ workload was greatly increased by open wards, 24-hour care, trial systems and newly empowered patients. Many of them remained opposed to the reforms. In ...”

“... tweets. Devotees of Wicca also call themselves witches. In fiction and legend, witches can be white or black, good or bad: they can be heroines and healers or hexing hags. What strange classification can bracket such diversity, from nursery tales to the blackest crimes? Roald Dahl offers a clue in The Witches, where he suggests that real witches don’t ...”

“... some honks of obtrusive moralism and a scattering of adjectives. The manuscript version of Snow White began: ‘Once upon a time it was winter & snowed down from the sky and a queen sat at a window of ebony wood & sewed.’ The equivalent in the first printed version is: ‘Once upon a time it was the middle of winter and the snowflakes fell like feathers ...”

“... Ireland Secretary after a mass break-out of Republican prisoners from the Maze prison, and Peter Brooke failed in a more recent attempt to leave the same office after he had sung a song on a television chat show in the Republic of Ireland, hours after seven people had been killed in a particularly bad atrocity in the Province. While ministers have been ...”

“... initiated by Suu Kyi, and obediently agreed by the NLD executive, has been just as unexpected. Peter Popham’s life of Aung San Suu Kyi is gripping, partisan and emotional, a welcome complement to the only other serious biography in English, Justin Wintle’s assiduously comprehensive Perfect Hostage. It contains fascinating new material and ...”

“... with a bottle of bright pink cough mixture always at hand’), put it to Peter Wildeblood, one of the co-defendants, that his lover Edward McNally was ‘infinitely his social inferior’, as though this social miscegenation were as much an offence as the act of buggery itself. ‘Nobody ever flung it at me during the war that I was ...”