“... inspired by avian flu, or the belief that it addressed a ‘black swan’ event – revealed the service’s inability to cope with a pandemic surge, and raised particular concerns about the amount of Personal Protective Equipment available for staff and the supply of ventilators. Sally Davies, then the chief medical officer for England, made one of the few ...”

“... failing to intercede on the victims’ behalf. This was the line taken in Massacre in Rome (and in Robert Katz’s book on which the film was based). Cosmatos and his producer, Carlo Ponti, were prosecuted for ‘defaming the memory of the pope’ and received six-month suspended sentences.Even more astonishing were the legal proceedings in 1994 against ...”

“... Robert​ Reed became president of the United Kingdom Supreme Court on 13 January 2020, succeeding Lady Hale. By the end of 2021, the Supreme Court had produced 111 judgments since his appointment, 53 in 2020 and 58 in 2021, with Lord Reed himself sitting in 56 of these cases. These decisions give us an opportunity to assess how his Supreme Court is performing in the current malign political atmosphere ...”

“... more? Even within that group, Stewart is exceptionally resourceful. His voice can be put in the service of feelings as they bubble slowly from confusion to clarity. Or it can be used to signal the intimation of half-thoughts, shadowy promptings of a kind that only a first-rate writer may catch in words. There is a scene early in The Shopworn Angel where he ...”

“... What is done in offices, to generalise, is pretty boring and derivative, being at the hands-off service-end of those other places of work where things got made, mined, taught or sold. Work that is always about something other than itself. Paperwork. Allowed to play, I typed ‘Dear Sir’ at the desk on the huge typewriter, sitting high on the chair, legs ...”

“... seems to have left him a parting gift: a small compass that William’s most recent biographer, Robert Richardson, takes as a hint that her lover orient himself in her direction.* This may be over-reading – William was an enthusiastic hiker – but the temptation is understandable: both before the marriage and for more than 30 years afterwards, she is the ...”

“... spent three years revising, Hergé said: ‘My childhood, my adolescence, Boy Scouting, military service – all of it was grey.’ A few years later he made a similar speech to Peeters, saying, however, that scouting had been in colour. His father was in the rag trade and there was a twin uncle. ‘They had the same moustache,’ Hergé recalled, ‘and ...”

“... Distribution was nicely random, with many of these books and pamphlets being trusted to the postal service, as gifts to peers, known and unknown. News had a frontier quality, coming in on the railway (in my case the clapped-out North London Line between Dalston Junction and Camden Road, for the great souk of Compendium Books). Control of production kept the ...”

“... script realised in film, the skiing drama Downhill Racer, directed by Michael Ritchie and starring Robert Redford. Solo Faces is the story of a rock-climbing drifter and his friend and rival and their pursuit of glory through heroic feats on the mountain. In the earlier A Sport and a Pastime, the quarry, the struggled for peak, is perfect sexual love, though ...”

“... lung cancer. He died at home in January 1972. Two months later, the McConvilles’ eldest son, Robert, was arrested and interned on the prison ship Maidstone, one of several thousand Catholics interned during the early 1970s on often unfounded suspicion of IRA membership. Helen, then 14, was taken out of school to help mind the younger children. After a ...”

“... may come from invention as well. One of the most vivid Anglo-versions of French social history was Robert Baldick’s Dinner at Magny’s (1971), in which everything that was spoken by the famous literary diners was a true quote, while the context and narrative furniture were often arranged, or rearranged. And Robb’s stories are, after ...”

“... brought in to film the big show was the estranged son of a former CIA director – is pressed into service whether it leads anywhere or not. Yet the novel doesn’t wholly solve the problem of reconciling its portrayal of Josey as a lethally effective operator with the raid’s failure to kill Marley, hand Seaga the election or even stop the concert. There are ...”

“... He meant: for thieving. He works Park Lane hotels. He wants to be back out there, delivering room service, finding theatre seats, tickets for synchronised swimming, and then ransacking passports and valuables. For a better understanding of the Olympic moment, I felt it was necessary to step back from the razor-wire zone, to take up a calmer scenographic ...”

“... I lack musical intelligence – for which I don’t even have genetics to blame. My older brother, Robert, is a successful pianist. Or, to quote my book Beethoven’s Kiss: Dr Train, the psychoanalyst my father had me see when [my brother] Steve killed himself, once told me, after having determined that my mother hadn’t caused my homosexuality, that the ...”

“... speculation – foundations, research institutes, area studies programmes – intended to service the military-industrial complex. He and other civil servants of his generation, nurtured at Yale, Princeton, Harvard, Wall Street and other playgrounds of the Wasp elite, took badly paid jobs in government out of a spirit of noblesse oblige. In the ...”