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“... as in budgeting the NHS. Indeed, political rhetoric wears hardly a fig-leaf in Fitzpatrick and Milligan’s broadside, even though the authors promise us The Truth about the Aids Panic – and we’d better listen because their message carries the weight of medical authority (FitzPatrick is titled ‘Dr’ on the front cover, and on the back we are told he ...”

“... the entire project with a glancing mockery that might have reminded a bookish provincial lad of Don Juan or the Dunciad, but of nothing he had previously encountered, or expected, in the cinema. At least where I lived, these were the days when art – that is, something shaped, polished, individual, original, impassioned but controlled, encompassing ideas ...”

“... first, as journalists tend to say on occasions like this, a stunned silence. The first to speak is Don Berry, a senior editor with over 17 years’ service on the paper. Speaking slowly, his voice trembling slightly, he says that the journalists of the Sunday Times have been treated with contempt: we have been told lies and our house agreement (guaranteeing ...”

“... Reader’s Gang Shows. Soon afterwards he teamed up with Michael Bentine, Harry Secombe and Spike Milligan to form The Goons: slightly wearing to listen to now (I suppose you had to be there at the time) but routinely credited with having ‘revolutionised British post-war comedy’ – unless that was Monty Python or Beyond the Fringe. He moved slowly but ...”

“... greed and the recession’, it was called ‘Who Ate All the Pies?’, and I’m afraid I don’t know the answer, because I went to ‘Rethinking Freedom in an Illiberal Age: Securing Rights or Celebrating Liberty?’ instead. I’d bought a two-day ticket at £80, for which I got a red plastic bracelet. I had to keep it on overnight, the man told ...”

“... to find out the identity of the culprits, the crime frequently described as ‘unimaginable’. I don’t find it hard to imagine at all. When I was eight or nine I used to play torture games with two other boys at my elementary school up on the recreation ground in Armley. I would pretend to whip them or they me and with a forwardness that I never afterwards ...”

“... eyes, before deciding to move in together.Ahalf-century​ on from the band’s messy divorce, you don’t have to go searching for Beatles bumpf: it’s everywhere. They’re as much a part of the public conversation as they ever were. Here is an incomplete log of Beatles sightings I kept as 2020 tiptoed hesitantly into 2021: in a Pierre Cardin obituary; in a ...”