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“... platforms complaining about having been ‘cancelled’. In 2020, the conservative broadcaster Andrew Neil tweeted that the left-wing journalist Owen Jones had ‘tried – and failed – to cancel my BBC career many times’. He was referring to Jones’s persistent criticisms of the far-right content that appears in the Spectator, of which ...”

“... Agency as their pretended target at random. The Minister of Trade in charge of the Agency was Neil Hamilton, the ambitious, dashing and very right-wing Tory MP for Tatton. For at least a year reporters at the Guardian had been trying to substantiate allegations by Mohamed Al Fayed, the proprietor of Harrods, that Hamilton had taken money, and accepted a ...”

“... towards it (the water on the other side bulges away). Things change very slowly on the Moon: ‘Neil Armstrong’s first footprint will be visible in thousands of years.’ You learn about craters, basins and lunar seas. Far from being a stable, distant globe of tranquillity, the Moon has been subject to billions of years of mega-violence, eruption and ...”

“... with the broadcasting media. Ministers are now instructed not to talk to awkward interviewers like Andrew Neil or appear on shows with an alleged anti-government bias, like the Today programme. There are to be new restrictions on the parliamentary lobby’s access to briefings from the PM’s spokesperson, thus making it possible to freeze out unfavoured ...”

“... seem curious now. ‘When the dance was over,’ Edward Gaitens writes in his best-known novel, Neil asked her to come to the door for a breath of fresh air. It was a starry moonlit night flecked with thin racing clouds. Laura said she was tired and was going home. Neil did not propose to see her home but when she left ...”

“... in January 1972 at the Old Vic, Jumpers came two and a half years after the Apollo 11 astronauts Neil Armstrong and Buzz Aldrin became the first men on the Moon and less than a year before the Apollo 17 astronauts Jack Schmitt and Gene Cernan became the last. Between July 1969 and December 1972, 21 astronauts left on Apollo missions to put men on the ...”

“... The evidence to add to the boots comes rather later, with the quotation of a recollection by Andrew Gallie, at whose manse Macpherson arrived in 1760 with ‘two Ponies laden’ with some of the ‘old Manuscripts’ which the literati had sent him travelling to gather, and from which he was required to produce the promised lost Caledonian ...”

“... a melting Richard Nixon; an early episode of I Love Lucy; a dinner-table scene from The Waltons; Neil Armstrong’s One Small Step; the shooting of Lee Harvey Oswald; the pilot show of Roseanne. Each viewer wore headphones; all you could hear was the giggles and gasps. On my little TV, where the picture was jumpy at first, was Jack Kerouac. He was sitting up ...”

“... of Morrissey to ‘blur’ his sexuality, to keep himself mysterious. (‘The first time I heard Neil Tennant describe the Pet Shop Boys as a gay band … I wished he hadn’t,’ Almond is quoted as saying in Jones’s book.) But time alters your sense of what risk really is. Soft Cell were pouting at the lads and their fads and their bigoted old dads. It ...”

“... has emerged, which threatens to bar our family’s return to its amnesiac state. Michael Collins, Neil Jordan’s film, is not about us as a family, but we are part of its revolutionary story and provide much of its romance. In May 1917, Michael Collins came down for a few days to Longford, one of those anonymous midland counties that tourists in Ireland pass ...”

“... The prestidigitator with the big beard must be Castro, but the missing leg is mysterious. Neil Bissoondath’s Digging up the mountains is a first book and a collection of short stories. The separate pieces are linked by an embittered sense of expatriation. Bissoondath himself was born in colonial Trinidad in 1955 and emigrated to Canada in 1973 after ...”

“... To the modern world Andrew Marvell is a poet. Earlier times knew him differently. From his death in 1678 until the late Victorian era he was mainly admired not for his poetry but for his politics. The 18th and 19th centuries commemorated him as the MP and prose-writer who had challenged tyranny and corruption and religious persecution in the reign of Charles II ...”

“... Handson management. Optimism. Good humour. That stuff. A cross between a hobbled moon walk and Neil Kinnock’s famous tumble on Brighton beach. Here’s the pitch, according to Mr Gibbons. Employment. Plenty of jobs for locals in a depressed area. The Jubilee Line extension. Life returned to the river. The defiant and cavalier spirit of free ...”

“... Government. The soft Left – those, broadly speaking, who cut their political teeth around Neil Kinnock – felt they had much more baggage to ditch. Unlike the Gaitskellites, they came to believe, quite reasonably, that their mix of policies was unacceptable to the electorate. The trouble was they did not know when to stop. It is the first step that ...”

“... My Lai or Jimi Hendrix playing his guitar at Woodstock, or of Khrushchev’s visit to Hollywood or Neil Armstrong’s bounce on the Moon: it is Abraham Zapruder’s home-movie of President Kennedy’s assassination, a concatenation of live seconds which changed the public imagination, allowing through its innocent portals a loud proclamation about the end of ...”