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“... always likely to be the hardest. Live through that, the novel implies, and you’ve got a chance. (David Cameron in his Party Conference speech was full of praise for a few well established immigrants; under current legislation it’s unlikely they would have been able to establish themselves.) If Sahota’s runaways are not living happily ever after, they are ...”

“... France, seems plausible. If these figures are accepted, it would make the battle less of a David and Goliath struggle than is popularly assumed. Curry also gives a good account of Agincourt’s after-life in Shakespeare’s Henry V, and in myth, legend, literature and propaganda, and describes the attempts made by the French to explain away the strange ...”

“... trying to exploit the chaos, out of power. But rather than protecting people from violence, Reece Jones argues in Violent Borders, such policies are in fact a cause of it. The central problem, as he sees it, is that in an age when barriers – to the movement of goods, capital, communication etc – have been coming down, the physical defences between states ...”

“... 1986, the centenary of Henri’s birth, Carcanet have brought out Alain-Fournier: A Brief Life by David Arkell, describing him as ‘the noted literary sleuth’. This, I think, does Arkell an injustice. As a sleuth, he hasn’t been able to solve the long-standing problems: what was the surname of the station-master’s daughter? What was Yvonne de ...”

“... who, at 68 with a receding hairline and advancing stomach, no longer much resembled it. A David Low cartoon from 1921 Churchill’s long career makes a history of his portraits a history of British art from Sickert to Gerald Scarfe. This is the premise of Black’s book, which ranges over cartoons and photographs as far as Clarice Cliff’s Art Deco ...”

“... American culture, began to favour the notion of identity being constructed on the basis of wounds. David Kessler, who was Kübler-Ross’s co-author on her last two books, proposes that the same stages are present in every experience of loss, not just death but divorce, moving house and changing jobs. From here it’s not much of a stretch to the Onion story ...”

“... Last July David Cameron announced a judicial inquiry into Britain’s alleged participation in acts of torture and rendition in the years since 9/11, though he also said that it wouldn’t begin until the current round of civil lawsuits had been resolved. The emphasis, he implied, would be on Britain’s role in condoning or assisting foreign agencies rather than on our own independent behaviour ...”

“... prints interviews with them, as if they were as respectable as the Shah of Iran. Dickson mentions David Bailey, who published a handsome photograph of the Twins, with an eloquent caption by Francis Wyndham, comparing them with Humphrey Bogart. It was the little public-school gang of Private Eye that broke through the hype: larger journals seemed awed by the ...”

“... is not to say that the current England team is not a diverse one. It contains a Welshman (Simon Jones), an Australian (Geraint Jones), a South African (Kevin Pietersen), even a genuine public schoolboy (Andrew Strauss), all coached by a white Zimbabwean (Duncan Fletcher), many having previously been schooled by an ...”

“... acquitted (he currently presents the Nigerian version of Deal or No Deal). Another was Vinnie Jones, the cartoonish hard man of the team who has since managed to make a good living in Hollywood playing cartoonish hard men in gangster movies (which indicates he wasn’t as dumb as he looked). Fashanu and Jones were two ...”

“... may say, of the obsession that one of his friends, Evert Dax, conceives for the splendidly built David Sparsholt, ‘I struggled slightly to understand it,’ but there’s no element of disapproval. Dax even asks why he’s so sympathetic, and he replies: ‘So much of that sort of thing went on at school it would seem very odd to me if it suddenly stopped ...”

“... who, even before they had met her, thought a woman’s place was in the home. One Labour MP, Jack Jones, pleased her, however, by saying: ‘we have plenty of old women in the House, so I have no objection to having a young one.’ Rose does not record two other exchanges with the same man which pleased her less. In one of them, when she was denouncing ...”

“... Modern​ Hollywood isn’t really Hollywood – it’s Calabasas. With everyone now the David O. Selznick of his own social picture, gossip replaced with tweets, and fan magazines with selfies, the grandeur of old Hollywood can seem mythical. Like proper myths, its stories are almost exclusively about metamorphosis, self-destruction and things going wrong, but they are at least stories as opposed to advertisements ...”

“... where it was common.’ And with water, much labour is involved. In the 12th century, as Emma Jones writes in her patchy history of London’s water, William Fitzstephen wrote of ‘special wels in the Suburbs’ where the water was ‘sweete, wholesome and cleare’. Water no longer has to be sweet by law, but it does have to be ‘wholesome’, a word ...”

“... the greatest risks. Here he plays an American-Italian trying to continue his romance with Jennifer Jones, an American wife and mother, while she tries to end it by catching a train out of Rome. For all his beauty, Clift comes across as spoilt and unappealing, sabotaging our compassion. It’s a charmingly decentred film, the camera drifting towards other ...”