“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... this year’). He got an A in Metalwork, but the teacher couldn’t think of his name and wrote ‘Robert’ while telling him to keep up the good work. His form teacher, Mr Norman, said that ‘Ronnie’s attitude and standard of work is slipping. I hope that he takes note of what has been said to him recently. He is always pleasant and happy.’ Ronnie ...”

“... exclusively for Harvard students in 2004. No human enterprise, no new technology or utility or service, has ever been adopted so widely so quickly. The speed of uptake far exceeds that of the internet itself, let alone ancient technologies such as television or cinema or radio.Also amazing: as Facebook has grown, its users’ reliance on it has also ...”

“... that carries Russian gas across the Black Sea to Turkey. No word yet about plans for the Eni service station on the road into Moscow from Sheremetyevo airport, the first ‘foreign-branded operator’ to open in the Soviet Union, hot on the heels of McDonald’s, in 1991.Draghi, like other Western leaders, has expressed not only revulsion but shock at ...”

“... the domestic intelligence network, with Special Branch frequently acting as the muscle on security service operations, as well as pursuing subversives in its own right. In 1919, under the Bolshevik-hating Sir Basil Thomson, Special Branch adopted the practice of intimidatory attendance at left-wing gatherings. It comes as no surprise to learn that it was ...”

“... with some of the older children. In Great Expectations: The Sons and Daughters of Charles Dickens, Robert Gottlieb quotes the letter in which Dickens explains to his wife what happened: ‘Presently, we heard them come back and say to each other with some alarm: “Why, the gate’s shut, and they are all gone!” Ally began in a dismayed way to cry out, but ...”

“... blame the historians, however: most of them believed they were going against the grain in the service of truth, believing themselves under attack from Republicans – a belief, as Roy Foster makes clear in his introduction to Paddy and Mr Punch, that some of them still hold. They never realised that they were justifying the new state, an Ireland cleansed ...”

“... she regretted her measure to abolish free milk in schools (characteristically blaming the Civil Service for her mistake), or that she had fought against the idea of abolishing the rates when it was proposed by Heath. It was also something of a shock to hear that she had toyed with the idea of inviting Roy Jenkins back from Europe to be Chancellor of the ...”