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“... he spent an inordinate amount of time in Barlinnie Prison, along with his three brothers, Willie Andrew, Charles and James. (His sister Nellie was the head of the Sinn Fein collective in Glasgow.) ‘Sheriff Malcolm, at Dundee yesterday,’ the Scotsman of 6 January 1934 reports, ‘imposed sentences of 18 months’ and five months’ imprisonment ...”

“... category and order. Genji, as one might expect, writes exclusively to women (including Mandy Rice-Davies, the Andrews Sisters and Virginia Woolf’s Mrs Ramsay), and displays an endearing capacity for romantic aberration, as when he assumes from her name that Barbara Windsor must be one of our royal house, the Third Princess after Di and Fergie. Being the ...”

“... news of a friendship that sprang up at that time between Denis and Mrs Foreman, alias Mandy Rice-Davies. My neighbour at dinner, the gentle and shy Baron Profumo, had reason of course to regret Mandy’s existence, along with Christine Keeler’s, and could only have been perplexed by Denis’s taking up with her.It happened like this. Denis was for years ...”

“... there was an increasing homogeneity of casting (the ‘anything with Tara Fitzgerald’ syndrome). Andrew Davies withdrew his adaptation of Angela Lambert’s A Rather English Marriage from the BBC when Alan Yentob insisted that an aristocratic ex-Battle of Britain pilot be played by David Jason; ITV loved it, but made similar demands. Eventually, back at ...”

“... likely to be referred to in the future by other people who write about the same subject’. Nick Davies’s Flat Earth News, however, is a genuinely important book, one which is likely to change, permanently, the way anyone who reads it looks at the British newspaper industry. Davies’s book explains something easy to ...”

“... Andrew Lang​ was in Oxford when he first encountered the living dead. One autumn night in 1869, he passed John Conington, professor of Latin, staring silently at Corpus Christi College. Nothing odd about a distracted don, except that Lang soon learned that Conington had, at that moment, been breathing his last in Boston, Lincolnshire ...”

“... story it was me. At 5.30 the next day Jamie arrived at my flat with his editorial colleague Nick Davies. (Mental health warning: there are two Nick Davies in this story. This one worked for Canongate; the second is a well-known reporter for the Guardian.) They had just come back on the train from Norfolk. Jamie said that ...”

“... In February 2009, Florence Aubenas – a French journalist well known for her dispatches from Rwanda, Kosovo and Afghanistan – disappeared from the pages of Le Nouvel Observateur. Was she taking a break or was she in Morocco writing a novel? A year later it emerged that she had gone to the northern city of Caen as a jobseeker. For almost six months Aubenas witnessed the recession from the frontline, working as a cleaner in offices, holiday villas and on the ferry that brings tourists to Normandy ...”

“... demand, and price rises will cool. If it takes a recession to achieve all this, then so be it. Andrew Bailey, governor of the Bank of England, has refused to state things quite so bluntly (as Karen Ward of JPMorgan Chase, a member of Hunt’s economic advisory council, did recently when she told the BBC’s Today programme that the bank’s decision-makers ...”

“... girls” in leafy Surrey, really require the patronage of “Uncle” Jimmy Savile?’ Dan Davies asks in his unpublished book about Savile: Many of the 25 or so girls in its care at any one time came from comfortable backgrounds and included the daughters of ambassadors and BBC producers. As a Home Office-approved school, funding came from Social ...”

“... and Amis’s spoof, The Egyptologists, and a liking for pornography memorably documented in Andrew Motion’s 1994 biography of Larkin. Satire and light verse were among Conquest’s strengths as a poet. He also wrote science fiction, co-operating with Amis on five anthologies of new sci-fi writing in the 1960s as well as publishing his own sci-fi ...”

“... cheerful philistine parody: ‘I am the batsman and the bat,/I am the bowler and the ball,’ as Andrew Lang put it, sending up Emerson. Thomas once told Treece that ‘I think a squirrel stumbling at least of equal importance as Hitler’s invasions, murders in Spain, the Garbo-Stokowski romance, royalty, Horlicks, lynch law, pit disasters, Joe ...”

“... announced its fifth interest rate rise since December, to 1.25 per cent. At the end of June, Andrew Bailey, the governor of the bank, admitted that inflation in the UK – triggered by a combination of war in Ukraine and supply-chain bottlenecks in the wake of Covid lockdowns – is likely to endure for longer than in the United States or mainland ...”

“... law reform, Elizabeth Blackwell to the medical profession, Florence Nightingale to nursing, Emily Davies to education, Josephine Butler to the attack on the double standard of morality, Margaret Sanger to birth control, and Emma Goldman to causes that anticipate the feminism of the 1970s. Forster offers no major reinterpretation, nor do all her biographies ...”

“... the first time they troubled Southern historians. Gladys’s family hark back to Cherokee Indians. Andrew Presley, a Scottish blacksmith, emigrated to North Carolina in the middle of the 18th century. His son fought in the Wars of Independence and finally settled in the district of Tupelo, Mississippi, where Elvis Aaron was born 150 years later. Elvis and ...”