“... music you find especially disagreeable is piped into the room at a volume so piercing it seems to be throbbing inside you. You might call this excruciating. Now imagine the music on a round-the-clock loop, with no indication of when or whether it will stop, and no escape. You might call this torture. That’s how Binyam Mohamed spent his time in the secret ...”

“... A spouse used to be considered an indispensable asset for a politician; but then not so long ago bank shares looked like a good investment. For the moment the most notorious of the sub-prime other halves remains Richard Timney, husband and parliamentary aide to the home secretary. On the London Review blog last month Jenny Diski wrote that for the MPs involved, the expenses scandal is ‘like being a grown-up caught picking your nose and eating it ...”

“... order to defeat the Labour Party. They demanded, and received, a promise that an Arab school would be built in Upper Nazareth. The mayor is nonetheless committed to the ‘Judaisation’ – i.e. the de-Arabisation – of his city, and Liberman declared in August that stopping the immigration of Arabs into Nazareth, as he calls it, is a national priority. The ...”

“... left the UK to join Isis in 2013. They were killed instantly. If this had been America, it would be just another small strike in a long war against militants who were possibly – but not demonstrably – plotting attacks on the allies’ home soil. But the British are more fastidious, and cautious with their money, and this was the first time that a ...”

“... been adopted. Suddenly we had a ‘constitutional crisis’ provoked, according to the Daily Mail, by ‘egos in ermine who gave two fingers to democracy’. In an allusion to the 1909 People’s Budget crisis, the Tory MP Edward Leigh claimed that ‘not for a hundred years has the House of Lords defied this elected House.’ This claim was trumped ...”

“... Art Gallery works in favour of the current exhibition. Strange and Familiar: Britain as Revealed by International Photographers, curated by the English photographer Martin Parr, is made up of around 250 works by 23 photographers who came to Britain for long and short periods between the ...”

“... the most evocative objects in Ocean Liners (at the V&A until 17 June) is a diamond and pearl tiara by Cartier. Not particularly spectacular as Cartier tiaras go, it was once the property of Lady Marguerite Allan, who took it with her when she sailed from New York on 1 May 1915 on board the Lusitania. Six days later, off the Irish coast, a German U-boat ...”

“... The first rule when concocting a conspiracy theory is not to make any claims that can be proved not to be true. It won’t do, for example, to assert that John Kennedy was shot by Jackie Kennedy, because it’s clear from the film footage of the assassination that he wasn’t ...”

“... of the year; U is the 21st letter of the alphabet). Brown and his colleagues, Chad Trujillo and David Rabinowitz, have submitted a name to the International Astronomical Union, but it will remain secret until it gets the IAU’s stamp of approval. Unofficially, they’re calling it ‘Xena’, after the character played ...”

“... Most of these elements have been given shows of their own.So they set out to renew the genre by suggesting that you look closer: that you look at the paintings as things; that you think about the paint itself and about the rough, direct, sketchy dabs and flicks with which it is put on the canvas; that you notice the rhythms – swirling or staccato ...”

“... By now everyone must know the deal: if 75 per cent of people who download the monthly installments of Stephen King’s ‘new’ online novel, The Plant, pay for it, he’ll keep on churning it out. Addressing visitors to his website as ‘my friends’, he urges them to ‘Remember: Pay and the story rolls. Steal and the story folds ...”

“... Shakespearean tragedy, they were doing it in drag. I had been inspired, if that’s the word, by seeing the play at Basingstoke’s Haymarket Theatre, which recently lost its Arts Council grant and has closed down. I remember very little about the production except that the actors were wearing heavy woollen costumes, which were no doubt suitable garb for ...”

“... Roger Ackroyd? It got talked about at the time for demonstrating, rather neatly it was thought (by the then sitting tenant of this space in the LRB, Thomas Jones, among others), that at the end of The Murder of Roger Ackroyd, Hercule Poirot hit on a wrong solution to the crime, that the too devious Dame Agatha had for once thrown even herself off the ...”

“... in the Home Counties to buy the replica kit. (And so on: that’s a gentle example.) Let it not be said, however, that I’m one of those part-time, long-distance fans who’s never set foot inside Old Trafford. I went in 1977, when I was nine. Bristol City, during their brief spell in the top division, squeezed an away win: it was divine retribution for ...”

“... hanging’. Donne, Jonson predicted, ‘for not being understood would perish’. So it proved. By the time of Coleridge, who with fellow spirits began the reassessment, Donne’s overthrow seemed complete. The few available copies of his poems, Coleridge noted, were ‘grievously misprinted. Wonderful that they are not more so, considering that not one in ...”