“... preposterous contraption of regeneration, whereby at moments of dire depletion, the Doctor may collapse, shimmer a bit and re-emerge shortly afterwards, in the body and person of someone new. Audience figures were nothing special to begin with. But it turned out that the show’s young producer, Verity Lambert, had ignored her boss’s instructions ...”

“... of objectionable material. A Senate subcommittee put publishers on the stand: ‘Here is your May issue. This seems to be a man with a bloody axe holding a woman’s head up which has been severed from her body. Do you think that’s in good taste?’ Fifteen comics companies went out of business in the summer of 1954 alone.Generations of fans have had ...”

“... Europe, Leopold had removed her from Miramar to confinement in the family’s castles. Leopold​ may have been unwilling to help maintain his sister and her husband in Mexico, but he was intent on creating what Steven Press has called a ‘rogue empire’ of his own. Driven by a sociopathic craving for wealth and power, Leopold wanted to be a despot, not a ...”

“... of her great theatre pieces, with the help of her surviving original dancers; and these may provide the core of work on which a lasting artistic reputation can rest – one that will continue to demand comparisons with great modern painters, composers and poets.In speaking of her fundamental contribution, it’s important to insist that she was an ...”

“... heroes’ who make up the Seat of Power. She doesn’t lack ferocity, however. ‘The donkey may not have fought in the famous and defining Liberation War, but the sticks and stones of Jidada would tell you that even with just her mouth alone she could do serious battle and slay.’ The sun symbolises the Old Horse’s grip on power; it only rises above ...”

“... diagnoses of insanity up to and including the ‘bloody week’ of suppression from 21 to 28 May 1871. Its records provide Murat with a climax of hallucinatory clarity and intensity. Men became battle-crazed and frenzied, while women were swallowed up by the capacious diagnosis of melancholia: a large number believed themselves to be Joan of Arc, whose ...”

“... shameful tale has been too often and too loudly told in recent times to need reiterating here. It may be that we have learned something from the error of our ways. We have faced up to our post-crash debts and are repaying them as best we can; our role in United Nations peacekeeping campaigns is too seldom remarked but is a matter for justified pride; and the ...”

“... the Syrian army when it came under threat from IS. When IS forces laid siege to Palmyra last May and drove Assad’s army out after a week-long battle, not a single American plane was seen. Similar selectiveness was exercised in Hasakah a month later, as I was told by a local YPG commander. The city is divided between a largely Arab district, where the ...”

“... a house’s sale price. In the 1930s it was 2 per cent.) When Thatcher entered Downing Street in May 1979, more land was owned by the state than ever before: 20 per cent of Britain’s total area. Today the figure is 10.5 per cent. The disposals include council houses, forests, farms, moors, royal dockyards, military airfields, railway arches, railway ...”

“... with other people, including for a while in the 1930s a love triangle with the American poet May Sarton in the course of which Sarton transferred her affections from Julian to Juliette.Bashford seems unnecessarily exercised by the fact that previous generations didn’t always share values we take for granted today. She berates both Huxleys for ‘their ...”

“... as ‘a cutting-edge technology vital to our strategic leader development programme … We hope it may also be of interest to the British army.’It was not. A plan to continue Sale’s research by assessing cadets at Sandhurst was derailed when he lost access to military personnel gradings after leaving the army in 1995. As a civilian, Sale ran a consultancy ...”

“... or ‘Alma Mahler called’), and some sentences could have come unchanged from a biography (‘In May they booked a hotel on the island of Brioni off the coast of Istria and took the overnight train from Munich to Trieste and then a local train’) or a helpful work of explication (‘In his invention of the twelve-tone system, Schoenberg had established the ...”

“... from the star system, withdrawal became – for a time – the definition of stardom. Groucho Marx may well have been the only insider to call her bluff. Encountering her one day in an elevator on the MGM lot, he lifted the brim of her hat to peer underneath: ‘Oh, I’m terribly sorry, I thought you were a fella I knew from Kansas City.’Garbo made the ...”

“... was a possibility of alleviating suffering, even bringing about an improvement. Their liberalism may well have been theoretically at the service of repressive Foucauldian power, protecting the status quo, but in practice they offered some chance of treating people decently and giving them a space to exist when they feel they can’t. When in the 20th ...”

“... dans la rue, ou dans le rêve’. Though Cornell separated himself from the Surrealists, it may be that he beat them, however unintentionally, at their own game. While he was cutting out constellation maps to line his boxes, he was also tracing his own constellations in his favourite routes around the Manhattan grid. As he was thinking of ways to make ...”