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“... should allow himself the chance to state a principle, as well as having the wit to hint that Lloyd George is the last PM one can imagine having a fuck. At one point he invokes Callaghan in Cardiff on 4 June this year – ‘perhaps the last Labour Prime Minister’. Callaghan is offered an umbrella against the rain. ‘“Thank you, but no. I prefer to keep ...”

“... become obvious that the Tories were going to lose the election? Was it that golden moment when Michael Portillo, that scourge of unnecessary public spending, announced that £60m of public money was earmarked for a new yacht for the richest woman on earth – even though Her Majesty had made it plain she did not want one? Was it this deranged belief in the ...”

“... the way we imagined the 1960s when we thought they were still the 1950s. Larry Gopnik, played by Michael Stuhlbarg with a fine capacity for recurring surprise, as if he were Clark Kent who kept forgetting he had another identity, is an assistant professor of physics at the local university. He is just coming up for tenure, and one form of the petering-out ...”

“... to Prince Albert Victor (‘Eddy’, Duke of Clarence and implicated in the scandal) and to Prince George, later George V. Carpenter visited Windsor in 1875 to refuse the offer, but ‘retained autographed photographs of the two princes’. The ambiguities abound. Carpenter’s socialism, and his work in activist politics in ...”

“... The publisher’s note on the jacket of George’s Marvellous Medicine says that ‘Roald Dahl’s Charlie and the Chocolate Factory was voted No 1 (above Winnie the Pooh, Lord of the Rings and Alice in Wonderland) in a Sunday Times survey to find the best ten children’s books.’ Even if the word ‘best’ is translated into reasonable terms (‘currently most popular’?), the claim remains impressive, and implies classic status ...”

“... Fatal Rivalry: Flodden 1513 provides a welcome antidote to the usual run of work on the period. George Goodwin places the events of 9 September 1513 in the context of the two kingdoms and their interrelated royal dynasties over the quarter-century leading up to the battle. He follows most Scottish historians in being impressed with James IV’s qualities as ...”

“... to understand for himself – and so do the journalists who write about him. Or most of them. Michael Wolff never planned to write a book about the president just as Trump never planned to become president. Wolff remained uncertain about his book’s prospects in the days leading to its publication in mid-January, though things began to look up when he ...”

“... in 1995. Mossbourne’s first head, or ‘principal’ as they are often called in academies, was Michael Wilshaw, who subsequently became chief inspector at Ofsted.Both City and Mossbourne began with a single cohort of Year 7s (11 and 12-year-olds) before building up to a full school and sixth form after seven years, which gave their heads time to decide how ...”

“... the odds this burly two-volume compilation of essays, brought together by Jim Dyos in England and Michael Wolff in America, became a classic. Against the odds, because these essays were, in origin, conference proceedings, and there were nearly forty of them. Conventional publishing wisdom would hope for only a modest success from such a formula, but The ...”

“... stories he may mean, but wouldn’t that be pretty much tautological? Certainly readers of George V. Higgins and Elmore Leonard would be surprised by the claim as it stands. Binyon also accepts without questioning the distinction between detective fiction and thrillers, or what he sometimes calls adventure stories. This is a familiar distinction, and ...”

“... Peter Arnett won a Pulitzer Prize for Hollywood-on-the-Mekong. Twenty-five years later, President George Bush introduced an ABC docudrama, The Heroes of Desert Storm, which, according to the network disclaimer, ‘interweaves news footage and dramatisations with actors and actual participants. To achieve realism, no distinction is made among these ...”

“... The​ city of Minneapolis, in which George Floyd lived and died, has been plagued not only by Covid-19 but also by an epidemic of police violence. As Mike Griffin, a community organiser, put it, he was ‘just as likely to die from a cop as from Covid’. Major news outlets, including the New York Times and Washington Post, seemed astonished at the scale of structural and environmental racism exposed by the pandemic ...”

“... bombing in 1986 of a Berlin discotheque frequented by American servicemen, the Secretary of State George Shultz said that it was ‘absurd to argue that international law prohibits us from capturing terrorists in international waters or airspace; from attacking them on the soil of other nations, even for the purpose of rescuing hostages; or from using force ...”

“... In its attitude towards Dickens,’ George Orwell wrote, ‘the English public has always been a little like the elephant which feels a blow with a walking-stick as a delightful tickling ... One knows without needing to be told that lawyers delight in Sergeant Buzfuz and that Little Dorrit is a favourite in the Home Office ...”

“... Ruritanias, as indeed we are all Ruritanians now. These fears weren’t formulated in response to George Konrad’s hefty new book, but they might have been. I don’t know when I last felt so mutinous while reading a book. A Feast in the Garden is an absolutely dire novel, misconceived, opportunistic, inflated, poorly written, cynical and floundering. Little ...”