“... Glasgow. Some bought Union flags from hawkers; most had brought their own. Women dressed in red, white and blue sang ‘you can stuff your independence up your arse.’ Expensive cars disgorged burly men from Ayrshire and Fife. A Rangers banner was attached to the metal railings in front of the cenotaph. Sections of the crowd chanted ‘Rule Britannia’ and ...”

“... lives and choices no other generation has ever had. I wonder why. I’m speaking, of course, of a white, Western cohort which the generations on either side quite rightly resent. What the hell did we do to deserve to have it so easy? Nothing. On one side the 20th-century wars, then in gratitude free education, housing, a long state-funded playtime that went ...”

“... spun a web of deception which had tricked Western intelligence services into thinking black was white, that bad cases – KGB penetration agents – were good cases. Anatoly Golitsyn, who defected from the KGB in Finland in 1961, was an immensely persuasive man who told the CIA the next defector would be a provocation, the term of art for someone dispatched ...”

“... sums of money, Purdy’s parents divorced, and his mother, Vera, began running a boarding house. Richard, his older brother, had a successful stint as an actor before alcoholism ended his career and forced him to return home. Snyder refers to him as ‘an aspiring actor and gay youth’ who felt stuck in a conservative Midwestern town, but there is no ...”

“... slow swing replaced by a nocturne. The station cut in again with a learned authority, ‘Professor Richard Pierson, famous astronomer’, direct from the Princeton observatory to explain the discharge and point out that Mars could not support intelligent life. Pierson, however, confessed that he could not explain the regularity of the emissions. More ...”

“... at least until Peaky Blinders came along? In my experience, nobody, not even Oswald Mosley or Richard Nixon, was capable of radiating such unease in company. Harold Macmillan couldn’t stand having Powell opposite him in cabinet looking ‘like Savonarola eyeing one of the more disreputable popes’. So he relocated Enoch way down the table where he ...”

“... antitheses, toning down the gaudy lexicon, adding weight to the petty rhythms, painting everything white. The replacement of the early histories by ones written centuries after the events was not so much an exercise in historiographical recension as an act of translation. At all costs, Great Alexander had to be rescued from the trivial indecencies of ...”

“... in his sixties with a big nose (one could see why he was cast as First Jewish Murderer), bright white hair flopping over his forehead, and an expression that was at once wily, charming and benign. ‘A British girl wearing the uniform of the tsarist Ministry of Railways!’ he exclaimed as he ushered me in. ‘What a nice thing to see. But why have you no ...”

“... was bestowed still the greatest honour that could have come my way.15 February. Good reviews for Richard Wilson’s production of Sarah Kane’s Blasted at Sheffield. In such a violent play, though, I find myself spiked by my literalness (as I remember being by Mark Ravenhill’s Shopping and Fucking). If a character is mutilated on stage, blinded, say, or ...”

“... same height and weight as Byrne in order to maintain verisimilitude’.In his 1959 biography, Richard Ellmann reported that Joyce ‘often agreed with Vico that “imagination is nothing but the working over of what is remembered.”’ Ellmann also quotes Joyce’s remark to Frank Budgen: ‘Imagination is memory.’ Budgen, whom Joyce met in Zurich in ...”

“... Kong she met Alexis Vedeniapine, a British army officer. Olubas tells us that Vedeniapine was ‘a White Russian, born in St Petersburg in 1916’ who had escaped the Russian Revolution with his family and was brought up in Shanghai before being sent to boarding school in, of all places, Woodford, Essex. From there he entered agricultural college, and worked ...”

“... see, if only we had looked. Two who drew the inevitable conclusions were the incoming President, Richard Nixon, elected on a promise of ‘peace with honour’ reminiscent of Mendès-France, and his devious National Security Adviser, Henry Kissinger. Both had impeccable anti-Communist credentials, both had travelled widely (Nixon as Pepsi-Cola’s ...”

“... Melville created an austere, sombre aesthetic: even his colour films appear to be in black and white. His protagonists, whether resistants, gangsters or priests, are solitary ‘men without women’, in the words of Volker Schlöndorff, who worked as his assistant in the early 1960s. Driven by duty, they move inexorably towards their fate, which is often ...”

“... needed salvation.’ In 2009, in a speech at Chatham House, the then chief of the general staff, Richard Dannatt, said: There is recognition that our national and military reputation and credibility, unfairly or not, have been called into question at several levels in the eyes of our most important ally as a result of some aspects of the Iraq ...”

“... from cheerfulness to death, without it seeming so dark or sordid a journey. The hotels were white. ‘They come here to die,’ wrote the man who laid out the gardens by the pier at Bournemouth. ‘Let us make death beautiful.’ The Royal National Sanitarium opened in 1855, followed by specialised ‘homes’ for invalid ladies, or for consumptives who ...”