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“... response to one of the few occasions when a disability materialises as an aspect of the hero. Howard Breslin’s short story ‘Bad Day at Honda’ has an explicitly able-bodied protagonist, while Spencer Tracy in Bad Day at Black Rock (1955) is famously one-armed. All Norden can think of to say is that Tracy’s character is ‘“remasculated” through ...”

“... it was more than 6ºF hotter. The urban heat island effect was first documented in 1818, when Luke Howard, an amateur meteorologist, took a series of temperature measurements in and around London which showed that the city was on average 4°F warmer than the surrounding countryside. It’s partly down to human activity (from driving to cooking to ...”

“... though occasionally, almost miraculously, it did. That I can remember the deaths both of Leslie Howard and of Carole Lombard chalked up on the newspaper-sellers’ boards in City Square hardly counts. But there was the afternoon sometime in the 1940s when I was out shopping with Mam and we were walking up Thornton’s Arcade and saw coming down a vast man ...”

“... national fund amounted to nearly £56,000, most of it raised in London. The money enabled Inigo Jones to rebuild the west front of the cathedral and to restore the choir – work which was not pulled down until 1687, having been weakened by the Great Fire. By contrast, the Puritan Feoffees of Impropriation, which Ashton hints were not necessarily distrusted ...”

“... most obviously Europhiles and those tainted with the original sin of 1990. Tristan Garel-Jones was known to Eurosceptics as ‘the Member for Madrid Central’ and the defeat of Chris Patten, the Conservative chairman, at Bath in 1992 was greeted at an election night gathering of Thatcher loyalists as a ‘Tory gain’. The voters came to recognise a ...”

“... conspiracy. The ideological adventurer, Jack Wheeler, known according to Bradlee as the ‘Indiana Jones of the Right’, had inspired the Reagan doctrine; North, placed in charge both of sustaining the Contras and of combating terrorism, embodied it. The Reagan doctrine declared a worldwide American right of counter-intervention against Communist ...”

“... interview with Simone Biles before she became a household name. The veteran reporter interviewed Howard Schultz at Starbucks headquarters. Ozy’s video stories were terrific but there were never enough of them to convince Watson that the video team wasn’t malingering. At its best, Ozy was clever, original. I managed a handful of stories I remember with ...”

“... who play ‘the mythical game of time’. An Occidental Haroun, he wears a broad-brimmed Indiana Jones hat. He’s a role player, a trans-dimensional tourist. Hence the language. ‘Pard’, according to Jonathon Green’s Dictionary of Slang, has no existence outside the fictionalised Wild West. Moorcock is like one of those local library researchers from ...”

“... but not a fine and really unusual Alma-Tadema portrait, an Egyptian terracotta statue, a Thomas Jones or a Lorenzo di Credi metalpoint; or that the largest picture on view would be a frothy, larky double portrait by Vanessa Bell of Mr and Mrs Maynard Keynes. The show is densely hung, with ten sections crammed into three rooms; but this rather serves as a ...”

“... that is the other impression one comes away with: the universal hatred and contempt for Michael Howard – prisoners, warders, teachers, everybody one speaks to complaining how he has stripped away from the service all those amenities which alleviate the lives of everyone cooped up here, warders and prisoners alike. Indeed one gets the feeling that the only ...”

“... debuts of some of Vonnegut’s contemporaries, notably Mailer with The Naked and the Dead, Jones with From Here to Eternity and Heller with Catch 22). After a conventionally modest beginning with the hardback-only Player Piano Vonnegut became a writer of original paperback fiction: a format which in those days categorically excluded a novelist from the ...”

“... of African descent had been enslaved in America. Sinclair worked as a financial secretary at Howard University, had degrees in theology and medicine and greatly admired Queen Victoria, the British Empire and Rudyard Kipling. He believed that the ‘blighting evils’ of his time, ‘mobs that torture human beings and roast them alive without trial; mobs ...”

“... Everywhere is palpably Edwardian and Arts and Crafts including a relief of a peacock by Burne-Jones. A film about the First War could begin here, the whole place redolent of the dead and particularly the illustrious dead. And, yes, there are memorials to the men of the village and others round about, but it is these famously unfulfilled dead of the Lost ...”

“... Kingsley Amis and Georges Simenon. When Amis’s second wife and fellow novelist, Elizabeth Jane Howard, saw him, at eleven o’clock on the morning he was due to lunch at Buckingham Palace, standing in the garden punishing an enormous whisky, she said, ‘Bunny, do you have to have a drink?’ He replied (and it was a reply that would have fitted a vast ...”

“... Law (1997); and Fox Nation v. Reality: The Fox News Community’s Assault on Truth by Mark Howard. I toss these books together to indicate how this digital age, which prides itself on its abundance and freedom of information, has become so uneasy about the pervasiveness of lying. We might add to these indictments three of Oborne’s earlier ...”