“... children. The Lancet of 6 March responded by publishing five statements; from its editor, Richard Horton, from three authors of the original paper (including Wakefield) and from the vice-dean and campus director of the Royal Free and University College Medical School. There was also a leader by Horton, ‘The Lessons of MMR’, and a ‘Retraction of ...”

“... the start, but since Maude Tayler did not realise that cows’ milk in Persia was not as rich as English milk, Doris ‘was half-starved for the first year and never stopped screaming’. Gallingly, her mother later took pleasure in telling her that she was an impossibly difficult baby, and then a tiresome child, quite unlike my brother Harry, who was ...”

“... back of the room, the smell of mimeographed programme notes. It tells an interesting story, but Richard Koszarski told it better, with more critical and historical acumen, in his 1983 study, The Man You Loved to Hate. There are still some unresolved points in the story, however. Stroheim himself was an unreliable narrator. Only after his death in 1957 did ...”

“... radio and founder of the Trumpist student movement Turning Point. On the eve of NatCon London, an English conservative commentator told me that the National Conservative worldview was ‘far too American’ to gain traction in the UK. ‘National Conservatism is just an imported name. The fact that Michael Gove feels so comfortable appearing at NatCon shows ...”

“... to be elusive. Oakeshott has most frequently been taken as the wayward voice of an archetypical English conservatism: empirical, habitual, traditional, the adversary of all systematic politics, of reaction no less than reform; a thinker who preferred writing about the Derby to expounding the Constitution, and found even Burke too doctrinaire. The amiably ...”

“... of the Yorkshire Dales by Robert White, one of a series, Landscape through Time, published by English Heritage. During the enclosures of the 18th and 19th centuries, most of the land enclosed was added to existing farms, but in 1809 John Hulton used the land allotted to him from the enclosure of Marske Moor in Swaledale to create a new ...”

“... in turn meant that such emotion was truer than anything else about the British psyche (the end of English reserve).In other words, faced with this public display of feeling, we could only cry ‘true’ or ‘false’. Is there any authority on which such judgments can be made? Or is it the need to judge, whether for or against, that is paramount, as if ...”

“... to build careers on the blacklist. The virus that would surface decades later, disguised as Richard Nixon or Ronald Reagan, began here. Fault lines in the American psyche are most obvious at the interface of showbiz saccharine and the political process: Monroe’s birthday tribute to JFK, Sinatra as MC at the Kennedy White House, late-liberal ...”

“... thing. I was just screaming. Listen to “a wop bop a loo bop a wop bam boom”’ – a Little Richard vocal line (garbled) from ‘Tutti Frutti’. ‘Don’t get the therapy confused with the music.’ And what’s true (and ‘simple’ and ‘real’) of the voice is also true of the instrument: How do you rate yourself as a guitarist? Well, it ...”

“... out in a group of ambitious black male writers who came of age in the 1930s and 1940s and included Richard Wright (born 1908), Ralph Ellison (1914) and James Baldwin (1924), Himes has never quite entered the pantheon. His peers were condescending: Wright never took him seriously as an artist; Ellison, who saw him as little more than an ex-con with a pen, joked ...”

“... of ‘contemporary art’: Nicholas Serota (at the Tate), Charles Saatchi, Sarah Kent (Time Out), Richard Dorment (Daily Telegraph, oddly enough). Against: Modern Painters, Brian Sewell (Evening Standard), Giles Auty (Spectator), Glynn Williams (at the RCA) and any number of Johnsonian or Waugh-like commentators who throw themselves into the breach on wet ...”

“... or ‘servile’). The opening cry is almost as much a problem. How can ‘Debout!’ go into English (‘Arise!’ is dreadful)? It wasn’t until Socialist Songs in Chicago in 1900 that ‘ye wretched of the earth’ was hit on as an equivalent to ‘les damnés de la terre’ – the ‘ye’ too familiar, maybe, but ‘wretched’ a great leap. (I ...”

“... for other ways out: the culture here is excursionary, touching on far more than the merely ‘English’. There is a good familiarity with American poetry, tending out of Objectivism, through Black Mountain, Beat, the ‘New York school’ and on, much later, to the more detached experimentalism of the L=A=N=G=U=A=G=E writers whose notion of ...”

“... that inequality means bad outcomes are being distributed across the social scale, making even rich English parents more vulnerable than poor Swedish ones. This sounds like a knock-down political argument: more equality would give rich people in unequal societies the kind of life chances that even poor people enjoy elsewhere. Who could object to that? It needs ...”

“... of his peers. Partly it’s the distinction – far more rigidly observed in Germany than in the English-speaking world – between serious and popular (e and u in German parlance, Ernst and Unterhaltung), but there’s more to it than that.There is something touchingly wrong about Zweig. He had a trammelled life and preached freedom; he gave himself to ...”