“... community clinics, research labs, congressional hearings, pharma stockholders’ meetings, social service agencies and guidance counsellors’ offices’. For autism in particular, this meant that the ‘clinical infrastructure’ of the condition was transformed ‘from a channel for optional reporting of isolated cases to a network for active surveillance ...”

“... In Praised Be Our Lords, he quotes a letter he wrote from jail in 1969 to Philippe de Saint-Robert, a Gaullist of the left and the author of Le Jeu de la France, which he had just been reading. The letter was signed off by ‘an ordinary young Frenchman who, because he loves his country and its people, went to Bolivia. Everyone plays … in his own ...”

“... The Buildings of England, but has been locked against vandals for years, though a communion service, spoken, not sung, is held there on the fourth Sunday of every month, and it’s still used for weddings and funerals (after which the corpses are transported by undertaker-led motorcades to the crematorium on the city’s edge).Between the village and ...”

“... used words such as ‘annihilation’ and ‘exterminated’. Around the same time, the writer Robert Heron travelled through Upper Clydesdale and concluded on the evidence of ‘certain marks’ that the now empty green valley ‘had anciently been a scene of agricultural industry and a seat of no inconsiderable population’.These desolating effects were ...”

“... ran efficient, low-profile businesses, averse to violence and with a premium placed on customer service. In the late 1990s, OxyContin helped them expand their market from California east across the Mississippi River, where dealers distributed free samples with their phone numbers outside methadone clinics, with the help of veteran addicts. The Xalisco ...”

“... Gloucestershire. Her father and mother both worked at the local woollen mill and Ann was sent into service aged fifteen, working for a butcher’s family. Wright wonders whether the animal cadavers helped give her a basic understanding of anatomy. Aged sixteen, she left the job to marry a tailor called Henry Sommers. He turned out to be an alcoholic, and to ...”

“... radio communications on the night were a complete disaster, owing to cuts in funding for the fire service. Many people believe, and there is some evidence for it, that the positioning of the new academy school knocked out too much space for fire vehicles to park. In any event, the fire was out of control within minutes and there was no extinguishing ...”

“... depression at Oxford; job in publishing, deadpan early novels, marriage into the Pakenhams; war service in Northern Ireland and Allied Liaison; postwar triumph with A Dance to the Music of Time? The most striking revelations come where he said least, of his childhood and his loves. The finest thing in Spurling’s book is her delicate portrait of the ...”

“... Merchants and Revolution, dedicated to Stone, comprehensively overturns that judgment. Its author, Robert Brenner, belongs to that rare group of historians who have given their name to a whole literature – the ‘Brenner Debate’ on the origins of agrarian capitalism in Europe recalling the ‘Pirenne Thesis’ of old. His new book, in which the name of ...”

“... though it was, was to help foster this American consensus. He admired Commentary’s film critic, Robert Warshow, for once saying, ‘A man watches a movie and the critic must acknowledge that he is that man’ – ordinary in his reaction however exceptional his talents for analysis. Podhoretz is in effect saying, without at first becoming an absolutist ...”

“... the first. The South Bank Show was also reviewed in the Spectator by Richard Ingrams, as follows:[Robert] Redford was followed onto the show by young Martin Amis, a rather scruffy looking man without a tie. I was baffled as to why his new novel should be given about half an hour of publicity when there are so many other things worthy of attention ... Amis ...”

“... landed on them, they had to perform sexual acts. The first mention of what the Crown Prosecution Service calls ‘voodoo’ came on 25 January 1994. The children had made allegations against adults in early December but these had only concerned sexual abuse and drugs. However, in November, the children had attended a Halloween party in Hamsterly Woods. The ...”

“... channels had been shut down? Who knows? Mohammed Hanif, the sharp-witted head of the BBC’s Urdu Service, which monitored the broadcast, confessed himself flummoxed when he wrote up what he heard. He had no doubt that the Urdu version of the speech was the general’s own work. Hanif’s deconstruction – he quoted the general in Urdu and in English ...”

“... could be married and a film born.The back office deity of that era was the seven-times-married Robert Evans, who ran production at Paramount for a decade from 1966, when the studio made The Godfather and The Godfather Part II, Chinatown and Rosemary’s Baby. The ghost of Evans haunts Pandora’s Box, which covers the time some perhaps premature ...”

“... to prevent, or make good, the consequences of bad loans and bankruptcy. As for the workforce, Robert Fitzgerald, in his account of the Rowntrees, points out that since ‘business and wealth were viewed by the Quakers as a God-given trust, labour could not be treated as a mere commodity’.In fact, some Quaker industrialists treated workers very ...”