“... a bit like selling a stolen Matisse. That is the way one report described the travails of Heather Morgan and Ilya Lichtenstein, a couple in their thirties who last year pleaded guilty to stealing more than 120,000 bitcoin – then worth $4.5 billion – from the Hong Kong-based crypto exchange Bitfinex in 2016. Just how the theft was carried out has not been ...”

“... that by all means in this country,’ Alderman Roberts of Grantham was moved to remark in 1946. As John Davis concluded in the Cambridge Urban History of Britain (2000), the second half of the 20th century saw local authorities reduced to ‘agents of the central welfare state, their incapacity off-set by central subsidies which covered over 60 per cent of ...”

“... Labour MP disagree with that? What they really hated was his questioning of the private sector. John Prescott had been allowed to pledge the renationalisation of the railways at the 1996 Labour Party Conference, but after Blair’s victory the following year the subject was never raised again. Until now. When I asked him when he first realised he might ...”

“... every week. It was with characteristic British reserve, though, that Lieutenant-Colonel David Morgan, Commandant of the 1st Battalion of the Seventh Duke of Edinburgh’s Own Gurkha Riders, set about straightening things out. The Gurkhas are the British soldiers whom, in an ugly slur, Garcia Marquez accused of committing almost unprintable ...”

“... ethics and politics, appraising his magisterial synthesis of Aristotelian and Christian thought. John Took asks ‘why Dante matters’ and responds by casting him as an existentialist philosopher. And in a retrospective collection of nineteen essays, Zygmunt Barański addresses the state of Dante studies today, reflecting on everything from his treatment of ...”

“... do not mean Hugh MacDiarmid’). Other Scottish writers were touchy subjects too: Edwin Morgan (‘Yeddie’) was a figure of suspicion, hitching a ride on the concrete bandwagon while blackening Finlay’s name as an ‘impossible’ person to the BBC and the Arts Council, though when Morgan proposed Finlay for ...”

“... big success was Faithful unto Death says all that need be said here about his work. Alice married John Lockwood Kipling, a sculptor who went to teach art in India, and became the mother of Rudyard. Only Louisa made what seemed at the time a good match from the material point of view, becoming the wife of Alfred Baldwin, iron founder and, later, MP. Their only ...”

“... but a guy liked to have good hair. Then some magic descended on him, and the magician was John Huston, who wrote the script for High Sierra (1941). It’s the story of a veteran gangster, Roy Earle, who wants peace and a new life. But as he comes out of prison, the girl he likes dumps him and he’s on the hook for one more job. Huston saw him ...”

“... report into the Met’s failure to solve the 1987 murder of a private investigator called Daniel Morgan accused the force of ‘institutional corruption’. Morgan was found with an axe in his head in the car park of a South London pub frequented by police officers. Despite four murder investigations and an inquest, no one ...”

“... leadership headed by Clement Attlee himself and including Aneurin Bevan, Edith Summerskill and Morgan Phillips. The second was a queasily assorted mob from the wider Labour movement: a constellation of leftist Bevanite MPs including Barbara Castle, accompanied by MPs from the pro-American right of the party and assorted trade unionists (some of them ...”

“... In June 2001, John Dower, a historian of Japan, wrote a comment piece in the New York Times about the blockbuster movie Pearl Harbor. The problem with it, he thought, was not its predictable romantic digressions or historical errors but its moral obtuseness. Like earlier films on the subject, it was ‘a paean to patriotic ardour and an imagined American innocence … sanitised to an attractive level of virtual violence ...”

“... individual cases, including those involving three cabinet ministers, Blunkett, Charles Clarke and John Prescott. Edis told the court that while their papers were busy hacking to find evidence of other people’s affairs – in January 2003 the Sun ran a story calling Andy Gilchrist, then leading the Fire Brigade Union in a series of strikes against the Blair ...”

“... follows a remarkable passage: ‘Among the neglected men I have found Robert Bage, Henry Brooke, John Bunyan, Geoffrey Chaucer, Thomas Delaney [sic], Emanuel Ford, William Godwin, Richard Graves, Robert Greene, Robert Henryson, Charles Johnstone, Charles Lever, M.G. Lewis, Thomas Lodge, Henry MacKenzie [sic], Thomas Malory, Charles Maturin, Walter ...”

“... jamboree was in nearby Miami’s South Beach that year). Will Self and his American publisher, Morgan Entrekin, arrived as I was leaving. The vast expanse of water and the huge hotel behind it made Self momentarily speechless. ‘Belly of an architect,’ he said, using the title of the Peter Greenaway movie to express his amazement. ‘A pool is ...”

“... from a sack Into a bucket, precise as a drumroll Down Sixth three buildings glow like ingots The Morgan darkens, an old tooth Doors of sound on 42nd Street Where I sit in the reading room At the window the sun comes and goes Like a heart pumping light This is from ‘The Days’, which appeared in a collection called The Floor and the Breath in 1994. The ...”