“... so often described. It begins with a policeman, walking down a foggy street. He glances at the gates of a scruffy old scrapyard and ‘passes’ by, Newman writes, while ‘we – the camera – glide into the scrap merchant’s yard to discover, tucked away in a corner, a police box.’ Meanwhile, two teachers at the local secondary modern are disturbed ...”

“... as a goitre prophylaxis was proposed again in 1898, 1909 and 1912. In 1911, the US researcher David Marine announced that he had used iodine to prevent goitre in freshwater trout, though he stopped short of endorsing an iodine deficiency theory. He thought the element probably counteracted another, goitre-creating agent, much as quinine acts on the ...”

“... essay to its origin and meaning. He’s even convinced he knows the exact location of the iron gates that lead to the cave where the knights sleep. At the start of The Weirdstone of Brisingamen, Colin and Susan are sent to Alderley Edge to stay with Gowther Mossock (himself a farmer) and his wife, Bess, their mother’s old nurse. Almost immediately they ...”

“... of the price war’s principal targets. (‘Don’t worry about the Telegraph,’ Murdoch told Sir David English of Associated Newspapers in 1993. ‘Leave them to me. I’ll put them out of business for you.’) Knowing that Black knew Murdoch socially, my friend asked him if he had ever brought up the subject of the price war. Black shook his head. He ...”

“... him as ‘quite miserable-looking … so thin, so little, so miserable’. The art critic David Bourdon thought his art collection ‘stank’ and took the view that Warhol was nothing more than ‘a window trimmer and chichi East Side gadabout who hung around with trashy people’. In the world of commercial art, as photography began to overtake ...”

“... to read before they could write, but some may have recognised only the letters in their own name. David Cressy’s research on England suggests a gradual, if uneven, climb in male sign literacy, from 10 per cent in 1500 to 45 per cent in 1714 and 60 per cent in 1750. Female sign literacy lagged behind male, but rose steeply from a shockingly low base of 1 per ...”

“... Kyemba, who spun tales of Amin as a cannibal and killer, including of his own wives and children. David Owen, foreign secretary under James Callaghan, compared him to Pol Pot; he also looked into the possibility of having Amin assassinated.But Ugandan Asians are a poor fit as victims. For a start, the expulsion meant different things to different people. For ...”

“... we shall never know.’ The regular scenario for many of Barry’s jokes concerned St Peter at the gates of Heaven, so that when he finally arrived there last month it can have been no surprise.24 February. One doubtful blessing of my new and sophisticated hearing aids is that I can hear every rumble and gurgle of my stomach as well as the children next ...”

“... accusation of academic complacency. ‘Lightning, Phoenix, Arizona’ has the abrupt menace of a David Lynch dream sequence, the cardiac arrest when a previously straightforward narrative crosses the line and touches a vertiginous post-mortem truth. We need to be reminded of the ugly, petrol-breathed, epidermic floss sulking past our own windows. These ...”

“... realm of the airport showed up as an orange nimbus against the purple night sky. In the morning, David Cameron was holding an emergency press conference on the television stuck in the top left-hand corner of the breakfast room: ‘Work is at the heart of a responsible society,’ he politely hectored the assembled hacks, while we sloped off on our walking ...”

“... of population.Fitzpatrick insists on the importance of anti-communism in unlocking the American gates as, to Soviet surprise and disgust, the US abjured isolationism to build a Western alliance aimed at containing the USSR. This is persuasive, but when it came to accepting DPs, other desiderata mattered too. Israel was unusual in its willingness to take any ...”

“... Sheryl Sandberg declared she was changing her Facebook profile to honour him. In 2019, Bill Gates ignored a letter from three Nobel Peace Prizewinners, including Iran’s Shirin Ebadi, protesting against his decision to ‘give a humanitarian award to a man whose nickname is the “Butcher of Gujarat”’. In January, Twitter and YouTube agreed to ...”

“... College’). Jessy Mair was the wife of Beveridge’s cousin, and remained so until David Mair’s death in 1940, whereupon she became Lady Beveridge. By the beginning of 1921 she was installed as secretary and dean at LSE, with unique access to the director throughout his tenure. She later wrote that she had ‘established when I came to the ...”

“... thanks to propaganda campaigns spearheaded by Bullingdon Club toffs like Boris Johnson and David Cameron, underwent significant revision. In the late 1960s and early 1970s, when the horse path alongside the Regent’s Canal was mud, and forbidden to pedestrians and cyclists alike, I rode to my gardening job in Limehouse on a market wreck bought for ...”

“... about Netanyahu’s predecessors, they had their fascination, from the monastic self-discipline of David Ben-Gurion to the gluttony of Ariel Sharon. Netanyahu comes across as a hollow figure: a ‘marketing man’, in the words of Max Hastings, who met him while writing a biography of his brother Jonathan. Yet Netanyahu can hardly be avoided, or his survival ...”