“... him for different, we were baffled by his ordinariness; anxious not to be thought ill-mannered, he held out no greater token of a need for forgiveness than this piece of social small-change.Alfred Hitchcock would have been pleased and frightened by this incongruity, as he was by so many others. The representative of evil in his films usually appears to ...”

“... was nothing to stop independents from standing: many did, and quite often won. Parliament still held debates, and Churchill faced regular criticism and occasional confidence votes. But the decision by Parliament to carry on beyond its statutory five-year term, as it had also done during the First World War, led to the longest interval between parliamentary ...”

“... out? Look at the summer of 1982 more closely. A handful of poorly armed Palestinians and Lebanese held off a very large Israeli army, air force and navy from 5 June till the middle of August. This was a major political achievement for the Palestinians. Something else was at stake in the invasion, however, to judge by its results a year and a half later ...”

“... to wander, our batteries go dead, our hearing-aid ceases to function. I have to say what Professor David Minter is far too sensitive a critic not to know well, often hints but never says outright. Large regions of Faulkner’s novels are inaudible. In the racing sense as well as the literary sense let us have a glance at his form in that alleged masterpiece ...”

“... man has revealed the hidden depths, the ugly unmastered history, of the country he claims to lead. David Duke, the former Imperial Wizard of the Klan and a former Louisiana state representative, whose endorsement Trump could barely bring himself to disavow, said that Unite the Right was intended to ‘fulfil the promises of Donald Trump’. When Fields set off ...”

“... Revolution. Yet he remains curiously absent from popular memory, and from the academic curriculum. David Carpenter, long-time professor of medieval history at King’s College London, remembers that his tutor at Oxford jumped straight from John to Edward I and left out Henry III altogether. During his long labours on this massive two-volume ...”

“... are given. If he hadn’t lost his seat the time before last, might his finger in the dike have held back the flood of arrogance, disunity and sleaze by which Major was overwhelmed?21 October 1997. Coopers & Lybrand dinner for selected corporate clients at the Lanesborough Hotel. I am placed next to Ed Straw, Jack’s brother, whom I immediately take to. He ...”

“... For as long as anyone can remember much of this land has been hidden behind tall fences. Walkers held their breath and made a wide circuit. Terrible ghosts were trapped in the ground. On the west of the peninsula, now captured by the Teflon-coated fabric of the Dome, was once the Execution Dock. The gallows and iron cage moved here from Wapping, when the ...”

“... extended feature for Vanity Fair. We learn that Bob Dylan adored her in Raintree County and that David Lynch kissed her after the 1987 Oscars (she was a fan of Blue Velvet) and that she resented Andy Warhol for making millions by turning her face into a silk screen image. What the book doesn’t do is discuss Taylor’s film performances in any depth. This ...”

“... threatens to rise even further under Liz Truss), so this should be easy enough. But the SNP has held power in Scotland for fifteen years and has its own list of embarrassments, notably in the areas of public health, education and industrial policy. Compared to low life expectancy, the highest rate of drug-related deaths in Europe and the near total foreign ...”

“... are not publicised? Should Israel, because of its widespread and emotional support in America, be held to a different moral standard than Pakistan or North Korea or South Africa.? In the age of a nation state, dual loyalty is not a concept or a criticism unique to America. It applies equally to the British Moslems who accept the late Ayatollah Khomeini’s ...”

“... We would like some examples of ‘the witty and highbrow artistic references’ which her friends, David and Jeremy, bandied about. But all we hear of Jeremy’s thoughts, when he and Rosie ‘tumble’ into bed, is that he thinks ‘fate had brought them together and they’d met in another lifetime.’ Jeremy is respectfully described as a ‘Cambridge ...”

“... discovered, the term is then taken to apply to anything which has that constitution. It is further held that since the possession of such a constitution is a necessary condition for anything to fall under the term, the necessity can be insinuated into the bestowal of the property that marks out the object as being of its natural kind. So supposing that G is a ...”

“... star. But Chapman was a fan like lots of others, in that the Lennon identification appears to have held the promise of an escape from his troubles, while also arousing or attracting feelings of hostility.It seems fairly clear that the two of them were in one important respect alike. If Chapman was wretched, so was, so had to be, his hero. In the world in which ...”

“... who all along decried the rumours of a rocket attack as ‘a mare’s nest’ (thus giving David Irving the title for a book) and said of Sir Stafford Cripps, who took the threat seriously: ‘What can you expect from a lawyer who eats nothing but nuts?’ Even when it was indubitably clear what was on the way, Cherwell fell back to arguing that the ...”