“... 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 ...”

“... for. But the most dangerous example by far is Pakistan, where the national intelligence service, the ISI, was intimately involved in the financing of the centrifuge programme, and sponsored the Taliban in Afghanistan. Senior personnel in the nuclear programme are sympathetic to al-Qaida: indeed, Sultan Bashiruddin Mahmood, who worked at Kahuta for ...”

“... experiment (Mary Butts, Djuna Barnes, John Rodker) was discounted, along with the social realists (Robert Westerby, James Curtis, Alexander Baron), who remain trapped in a ghetto of unfashionable leftist politics and unfashionable locations. The locations – Whitechapel, Notting Hill – have recovered, but the politics have evaporated like a puddle on hot ...”

“... a Labour leader, when fighting to win a general election?’ ITV’s excitable political editor, Robert Peston, asked the same day. It was bracing stuff, and if you’re sympathetic (perhaps even if you aren’t; Brexit and Trump are at the back of everyone’s minds, after all), it makes you sit up and wonder, however fleetingly: could he do it?In ...”

“... a Greene, the Pinner of Wakefield (c.1590), Antony Munday’s two-part Downfall and Death of Robert Earl of Huntingdon (1598) and Jonson’s unfinished Sad Shepherd – remember or re-enact the paradigmatic story of Robin Hood. In George Peele’s Edward I, the Welsh bandit Prince Lluellen and his followers give their cause a veneer of mischievous ...”

“... who executed fifty prisoners by blowing them from guns after the Kuka outbreak in 1872. Sir Robert Davies, O’Dwyer’s predecessor as lieutenant governor of Punjab, defended Cowan wholeheartedly: ‘Blowing from a gun is an impressive and merciful manner of execution, well calculated to strike terror into the bystanders.’ Mountstuart ...”

“... Donne, penned at the bottom of a letter informing Anne of his dismissal from Egerton’s service. Rundell, who doesn’t revere her subject so much as like him an enormous lot, prefers a different origin story for the verse, from a 17th-century jestbook in which the new-married Donne, ‘in a frolic’, scrawls the punning line in chalk on his ...”

“... base except the archetypal white male rock critic. In mini hatchet jobs for the Village Voice, Robert Christgau declared war on ‘the enemy’. He situated Abba in the tradition of the advertising jingle and sniped that their ‘disinclination to sing like Negroes reassures the Europopuli’. The Anglo-American pop-rock canon had by then established ...”

“... of a woman who opted for a prophylactic mastectomy after signing up for a genetic sequencing service and being told she carried a BRCA mutation – but she had signed up originally because she thought knowing more about her genetic profile might help her design an effective exercise programme.Last year the government’s ten-year plan for the NHS ...”

“... The pages of the Spectator and the Telegraph have been filling up with denunciations of the civil service and Parliament for some time. Tory moderates such as Amber Rudd and Matt Hancock have shown themselves to be willing to say things they don’t believe in exchange for power. This is the energy and propaganda that propelled Johnson to office. It’s not ...”