“... the obituary, Sam had had a late flowering and that in his nineties he had figured in one of the Harry Potter films. The obituary written by Nicholas de Jongh.14 July. I am reading as a bedside book The Diary of a Bookseller by Shaun Bythell. Simply an account of the customers and the (sometimes meagre) takings of a bookshop in Wigtown in Scotland, it’s ...”

“... in sympathy with what he called Taylor’s ‘appetites’ and bought her a diamond pendant from Harry Winston.‘The Leaden Echo and the Golden Echo’, which he read at the funeral, was Taylor and Burton’s favourite poem. It starts:How to keep – is there ány any, is there none such, nowhere known some, bow or brooch or braid or brace, láce, latch or ...”

“... O’Leary’s Cow’ or ‘The Elements – Part 1’) sounds like the Marx Brothers scored by Harry Partch. It’s bold and unhinged and epiphanic, but you have to wonder what it would be like to have this sort of thing going on in your head all the time. There are moments on SMiLE that teeter on the edge of mania – a reminder of the ready availability ...”

“... his face … If Wilde’s plays in London didn’t run for three hundred performances, and if the Prince of Wales didn’t attend his first nights, he would be in prison and Lord Douglas as well.’ Gide did not tell his mother what really happened to him in Algiers. He recounted it in Si le grain ne meurt, 30 years later, and said that it had been the ...”

“... The most startling case pre-Vietnam was the atomic bomb, about which Congress knew nothing until Harry Truman decided to use it without Congressional approval. Lyndon Johnson, eager to force a favourable settlement in Vietnam, stretched the principle even further, which in turn has cleared the way for George W. Bush to widen the constitutional gap opened for ...”

“... US handed over its dirty work in Iraq to another private outfit with a genius for publicity: Erik Prince’s Blackwater, which reinvented itself as Xe, which reinvented itself as Academi. In 2020, it was reported that Prince had approached Wagner to offer them his services. Wagner wasn’t interested: it’s their war ...”

“... then declined to answer them.As Javid left the sports centre, the queen arrived, accompanied by Prince William. Sue Harris, the head of the borough’s Environmental Health Department, took them round. As soon as the queen appeared in the main hall, Mrs Jafari, the dead man’s widow, let out the most chilling howl, as if the terrible fact of what had ...”