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“... and jump off the jetty during games of Journey To The Bottom Of The Sea. He wants to be George Best, is always on the look-out for horrible ways to die, and has vivid explanations for everything: Some of us weren’t allowed to swim down at die seafront. If you cut your toe on a rock you’d get polio. A boy from Barrytown ...”

“... Mueller teaches in Ohio, one of the now-famous ‘red states’ that elected the warrior-president George W. Bush to a second term, he seems largely oblivious to the fact that a clear majority of Americans consider war to be anything but obsolete. Political elites in the United States came away from the Cold War enamoured of military power. Events of the 1990s ...”

“... not even the reputation of a great house, and Dickens’s pile on Tavistock Square drew ire from George Eliot. ‘Splendid library, of course,’ she wrote, ‘with soft carpet, couches etc, such as become a sympathiser with the suffering classes. How can we sufficiently pity the needy unless we know fully the blessings of plenty?’ The commentators spoke ...”

“... was elected, he spoke at a mental health trust fun day in his constituency instead of going on the Andrew Marr Show. Later that day he was filmed as he hurried along the pavement outside Westminster in silence, refusing to answer reporters’ questions: it ‘looked like a perp walk’, Jonathan Freedland wrote in the Guardian. ‘He isn’t playing the ...”

“... at the Old Bailey produced less certainty about who really did what to whom than if Jeremy Thorpe, George Deakin, David Holmes and John Le Mesurier had been invited to take off their shoes and socks and walk along a trench full of glowing charcoal. As with the trench method, the populace gathered to watch or to read about how the defendants survived this ...”

“... into James Boswell’s arms, and then into a life of poverty and relative obscurity. Donna Andrew and Randall McGowen’s The Perreaus and Mrs Rudd and Sarah Bakewell’s The Smart both tell the same story, but approach it in very different ways. Bakewell’s eloquent version reads rather like an 18th-century romance. ...”

“... palpable relief that we’re finally turning to more engaging topics: the rights and wrongs of Andrew and Harry. Not everyone has succumbed: there are still rationalist anti-monarchists criticising us for trivialising our discourse with unwholesome royal gossip. They’ve been making the same objections for two hundred years; indeed ...”

“... who today seems most like a real President is Martin Sheen, who plays one in The West Wing.1 George W. Bush – the less real real President – has settled for the part of a B-movie cowboy, and takes his role very seriously. Only the other day he was talking about ‘riding herd’ with the Middle East peace process. Bush made Wild West philosophy a ...”

“... he doesn’t owe much of a debt to what I think of as the Clydeside novel, he does share with George Blake’s The Shipbuilders (1935), Edward Gaitens’s Dance of the Apprentices (1948) and Hugh Munro’s The Clydesiders (1961) a strong feeling for the life of the people who lived by the River Clyde during a time when it was recovering from its oft-cited ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... of the late duke, whose portrait was knocked down somewhat humiliatingly at £500. His handsome George III writing desk went for a reasonable £1375 but the pair of ‘Her Grace’s bespoke hen boxes’ (‘pine and plywood’), fetched £10,625 and her ‘novelty egg cruet’, estimate £100-150, reaching £7500. The sale finished at 7 p.m. having raised ...”

“... of reconciliation with his friends. Newspapers are ‘they’ and we, after all, are ‘we’. As Andrew Boyle relates, it turned out that a great many old acquaintances of Burgess and Maclean were much more horrified – felt, indeed, much more betrayed – by the fact that the late Goronwy Rees gave a version of their flight to the People than by the flight ...”

“... For Sher, the Scottish printers and booksellers of the second half of the century, such as Andrew Millar, William Strahan, Thomas Cadell (father and son) and George Robinson in London, and Alexander Kincaid, John Balfour, John Bell and William Creech in Edinburgh, were not ‘mechanicks’ as Strahan once ...”

“... preachin,’ she said. North Carolina was the birthplace of Billy Graham and three US presidents, Andrew Johnson, James Polk and Andrew Jackson, and also, among the twinkling lights out there, you could find the uncelebrated birthplace of Thomas Wolfe, the North Carolinian who wrote Look Homeward, Angel. As the truck got ...”

“... nearest Tube, rather oddly, is Tower Hill), his work in a record shop, and his hatred for Andrew Lloyd Webber’s music. With an unerring gift for making the worst of things he takes Madeline to Phantom of the Opera, queuing for five and a half hours only to see the last tickets go to those just ahead of him, then buying two tickets from an agency for ...”