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“... ministers scurried into the City to seek out millionaires to conduct the Government’s business: David Simon from BP, Martin Taylor from Barclays Bank, Peter Davis from the Pru, even that devoted Thatcherite Alan Sugar of Tottenham Hotspur. Past Labour Governments had made some small effort to assert their democratic rights over unelected financial power. In ...”

“... murderous vaccines’; the World Health Organisation in league with the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation in a ‘transnational group of bad actors’; ‘Dear Friends, Sorry to Announce a Genocide’. And it’s been no better since Wolf was allowed back on ‘X’, as we must now call it after Elon Musk took over Twitter. ‘Ed Dowd Reveals ...”

“... and outside of churches. Images of the Virgin and saints also decorated public buildings, city gates, private houses and even street corners. Their ubiquity underlined the idea that the faithful on earth belonged to a much larger community which also embraced the dead in purgatory and the saints already in heaven, not to mention innumerable angels of ...”

“... during the Cuban crisis Macmillan kept sending telegrams to Washington which his own Ambassador, David Ormsby-Gore, tore up, describing them as ‘practically incomprehensible’ and ‘wholly out of order’. Cradock doesn’t see Cuba as a Kennedy triumph – JFK used brother Bobby’s backchannel route to the Soviet Ambassador, Anatoly Dobrynin, to ...”

“... invisible from the road, its presence marked only by a dilapidated octagonal lodge beside rusty gates. Who knew what relics of its former chatelaine’s Shakespearean activities the place might conceal? An unaccustomed peep into Debrett’s Peerage revealed that Christ Church, the Oxford college to which I was then attached, was the one attended by ...”

“... feathers. ‘Distinction in garments’ was, they argued, invidious. Much later, Jacques-Louis David, the artist most identified with the revolution, was asked to come up with an alternative for parliamentarians, a costume that would evoke the dignity of the Greek and Roman republics. The result was a complicated outfit, involving tights, tunics and ...”

“... can be exaggerated, faked or feigned,’ the psychologists Peter Halligan, Christopher Bass and David Oakley wrote in their introduction to a collection of essays from 2003 titled Malingering and Illness Deception. Medical professionals, researchers and even courts, they went on, were often reluctant ‘to entertain the label or to stigmatise individuals as ...”

“... like Angleton in the room. When he wanted someone to understand the Monster Plot – someone like David Blee, for example, who took over as chief of the Soviet Bloc Division in the CIA’s clandestine wing in 1971 – Angleton would schedule time for ‘the briefing’. He didn’t tell Blee what it was all about in twenty minutes: he walked him through ...”

“... describes is a traveller’s nightmare: Englishness lost, identity cancelled, fatal infection,’ David Seabrook writes of Thomas De Quincey. Of himself, the dole-queue De Quincey, making a high-velocity, long-term progress through the Isle of Thanet. More speed, less haste: Seabrook is a master of the throwaway put-down, a speculator in tachist ...”

“... wore the face of American nationalism, did the global Olympic village have an enemy guarding its gates or merely another voyeur? It was difficult not to see the bombing as retribution for the extraordinary self-promotion that brought the Olympics to Atlanta and, to the consternation even of American journalists, dominated the competition. In violation of ...”

“... in any other. (I’ve been told that senses are sometimes given to concepts at Oxford after the gates close to visitors; but that may be a leg-pull.) Nor am I clear what you’re supposed to do with a notion once a sense has been given it. There used to be a story according to which empirical inquiry works by first giving senses to notions, and then ...”

“... wistfully of seeing Len Hutton in his prime, captained a team called the Gaieties XI. Simon Gray, David Hare and Ronald Harwood are or were known to be keen on the game, too. And Tom Stoppard, another follower, has a striking set-piece in The Real Thing in which a playwright, explaining dramatic technique, says: ‘What we’re trying to do is to write ...”

“... York Times critic Anatole Broyard, who died in 1990, was unmasked in the New Yorker by Henry Louis Gates. In the early 1950s, Broyard had threatened to sue the publishers of a novel by Chandler Brossard, Who Walk in Darkness, which contained a character evidently based on him. It began: ‘People said Henry Porter was a Negro.’ In the version that was ...”

“... and has given rise to great unease, even evasiveness, among liberal commentators in Israel. David Shulman’s afterword to this edition is an impressive exception. Khirbet Khizeh is an Arab village, which is captured – more or less without a fight – by a detachment of Israeli soldiers in the 1948 war. (The word khirbah in Arabic, like the Hebrew ...”

“... but a Tory government nor by the sound of it ever wants to. At Birmingham I have a session with David Edgar’s playwrights’ class, then do another ‘Our Alan’ performance for a more general audience. 26 January. Run into Tristram Powell. Andrew Devonshire (sic) has done a diary for the Spectator mentioning the memoir of Julian Jebb (edited by ...”