“... he called her ‘bolshevick’ tendencies, was relieved that she had chosen a reasonably promising young man whose family he knew. Mosley, Robert Cecil reported to Curzon, was ‘not in the first flight’ but had ‘a good future before him’. He was two years older than Cimmie; very dashing (though Curzon at once remarked on his ‘rather Jewish ...”

“... 1887 had made many other charges under the heady influence of a group of clever and unscrupulous young Irish Unionists who had captured the paper, then under the nominal direction of a senile manager and an infant editor. Parnell, Michael Davitt and the Land League were accused of having inspired agrarian outrages ...”

“... requirements and raises pay, Osama’s guarantee of hardship, hunger and probable death has young Muslims jumping the jihad queue. By body count – which proved an unsure indicator in Vietnam – the US is winning. It has killed and incarcerated more Muslims than Osama has Westerners. But Osama has the upper hand. The American invasion and occupation ...”

“... clarified alarmingly the discourse around the question of homosexuality in the years we were too young to know much about it; by the time the Sexual Offences Act is passed, at the end of his second volume, we were thirteen. I know I was alert by then to the word ‘homosexual’ as it appeared in headlines, and disturbed by this bold-faced naming of a ...”

“... lost. ‘Losing a country’, or ‘losing a home’, if I gave the matter much thought when I was young, was an acute world-historical event, forcibly meted out on the victim, lamented and canonised in literature and theory as ‘exile’ or ‘displacement’, and defined with appropriate terminality by Edward Said in his essay, ‘Reflections on ...”

“... be kept green against the possible arrival of the men in white coats. 19 January. Watch a video of Michael Powell’s A Matter of Life and Death (1946), the first time, I think, that I have watched it all the way through since I saw it as a child at a cinema in Guildford. Then its particular interest was that the village scenes featuring the local doctor ...”

“... Californian born of Boers. He was also, we soon realised, gay. After a while he introduced a young friend, Arthur, who came around with him and learnt his trade, devotedly watching Villiers as he fixed our errant Windows, e-mail and printers. One day Villiers let us down even more badly than usual and I was getting ready to fire him when I ran into my ...”

“... the bold lettering VENEREAL DISEASES, a colleague came to the desk and Charles shut the directory. Michael said, ‘Have you spoken to anyone here this morning yet?’ ‘No.’ Michael was American, too. They worked in an American investment company. ‘No one’s told you about Harold Cripps?’ ‘No.’ ...”

“... curtains of Irish lace. ‘That dog has no right to be walking over there,’ said the lady. The young man smiled and snapped his fingers. ‘Dog got no sense of history,’ he said, then he laughed. ‘And you got none neither,’ she said, pressing the tissue into her sleeve. Only ten minutes’ walk from the Kennedy house in Brookline, another ...”

“... Europe made it impossible for him to keep the faith. Recollections vary, however. According to Michael Crick’s biography from 2022, some of his fellow pupils at Dulwich College remember the young Nigel being more hard-right than centre-right, closer to the National Front than he was even to the outer fringes of the ...”

“... called the Violet Quill had formed, and its members – Christopher Cox, Robert Ferro, Michael Grumley, Andrew Holleran, Felice Picano, Edmund White and George Whitmore, together with the film critic Vito Russo and the editor and academic George Stambolian – began producing books whose examination of gay life, though often programmatic, was still ...”

“... represented’ to be government policy. In a letter written in December 1984, Michael Heseltine, who was then Defence Secretary, referred to the guidelines as ‘the new policy’. They were also referred to as such on different occasions by Sir Geoffrey Howe, by Margaret Thatcher and by various government spokespersons. When Parliament ...”

“... the names of slaves, about pseudonyms (Thackeray wrote as Charles Yellowplush, Ikey Solomons, Michael Angelo Titmarsh, Bashi-Bazouk, Folkestone Canterbury, George Savage Fitz-Boodle, Dr Solomon Pacigico and Launcelot Wagstaffe), about Homeric catalogues, about allegory, about Milton and Spenser and Shakespeare and Joyce and Nabokov. Some pages are so ...”

“... schooldays. He was four years below me, notorious as soon as he arrived, because he never seemed young. He wandered around the school gazing blandly at people through his windscreen spectacles and clutching a gigantic briefcase, in which, it was rumoured, resided his ‘stocks and shares’. He was one of those boys – already playing the markets at 13. But ...”

“... manufacturing sources products in the low-slung factories that line its highways; inside, teams of young women, sought after for their manual dexterity, put in long hours assembling everything from children’s toys to computer chips. According to one estimate, the Delta, home to just 60 million people, produces 5 per cent of the world’s manufactured ...”