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“... Appia Nuova. I rang the bell and waited. Presently a bald, smiling face appeared. ‘Ah, Signor Thomson,’ he said with enthusiasm and held out a hand. Milza was a man of old-fashioned courtesies. He said he had retired from San Giovanni Hospital eight years ago. I showed him a copy of the surgical report he had written in January 1984. Removing his ...”

“... pleasure is in the struggle, in Rabelais’s ‘contradictions, unresolved and gaily accepted’. Ian Thomson tells us that Levi also loved Azio Corghi’s high Modernist opera based on Gargantua that had its premiere in 1984. The atonal music did not interest him, but the spectacular special effects (a giant jet of the protagonist’s urine drenched the ...”

“... to wait 35 years for the first pay-off from their investment, while in the meantime providing Ian Smith’s Rhodesia with two-thirds of its power supplies. Indeed, it was only after acrimonious argument that the Zambians prevented CAPCO fixing the water intakes nine feet higher on their side of the Zambezi than on the Rhodesian side, which would have made ...”

“... a cameo role as an air-force officer who questions the wisdom of the scheme. In the meantime, Ian Colvin, a journalist whose investigation into the wartime coup had prompted Montagu to come out first with his authorised version, published The Unknown Courier. So the tale has been told before, but Ben Macintyre has done a more thorough and readable job of ...”

“... book proves, however, Miller can quickly be rejected for second place. It goes, unquestionably, to Ian Botham. Indeed in one crucial respect, Botham beats even the great Sobers himself. Only 22 times in over a thousand Test matches has a player taken five wickets in an innings and scored a hundred in the same match. Frank Keating tells us: ‘Thirteen players ...”

“... my staff are in debt?’ Money​ really began to matter when the Canadian newspaper publisher Roy Thomson bought the Sunday Times in 1959. Astor commissioned a profile of Thomson, which shocked him by its unfairness when he read it on holiday on Jura; he was always immensely proud of the Observer’s profiles and their ...”

“... frost subdu’d, / Gradual, resolves into a weeping thaw’, though Johnson’s admired James Thomson, author of these lines, came close to being Fergusson’s contemporary. That sense of linguistic jolting and, not infrequently, of cross-linguistic connections lends Watson’s anthology its revelatory potential. Ossianic translatorese, the Burns who ...”

“... editorial opinions reflect its owner’s views. Great Fleet Street magnates like the first Lord Thomson bought newspapers as if they were Mars Bars, yet never showed any discernible interest in what they said. As long as the balance-sheet looked healthy that was good enough for him, and justified his continued ownership. My sympathies are entirely with the ...”

“... a whiff of Mr Scott’s attempts to merge the Guardian with the Astor Times and later with the Thomson Times. It was long after the event that I learned how Richard Scott, Laurance’s cousin and the chairman of the Scott Trust, flew to London from Washington on what my old employers would have called a ‘mercy mission’ to save us from being sold into ...”

“... Lord Beaverbrook seemed to me an infinitely preferable version of the genus than, say, Lord Thomson, who originally regarded owning newspapers and radio stations as no different from owning profitable toothpaste factories or fast-food chains. Though he altered that view later, it was not in the direction of greater interference with editorial ...”

“... made it to the senior secondary that year. The other was a quiet, red-haired girl called Jean Thomson and she was also put in the lowest grade, in her case 1G. Our parents were working-class and when I read in Todd’s book that ‘working-class children were likely to find themselves relegated to the lowest streams of grammar schools, regardless of their ...”

“... dismemberings. Methuen (which celebrates its centenary in 1989) was sold in 1987 to International Thomson, who broke it up, selling the general and children’s list to Paul Hamlyn’s Octopus, itself subsequently acquired by Reed International. Methuen’s academic books remained with Thomson, who now bring them out under ...”

“... an individual. When Sobers accepted an invitation to play in a double wicket competition in Ian Smith’s Rhodesia he was totally unprepared for the outcry of pain and rage. Manley insists that Sobers apologised. But a reading of the letter, drafted by the late Eric Barrow (then Prime Minister of Barbados), which Sobers signed and prints in his ...”

“... apart as chancers and innovators. Brenner picks out as the central figure among them one Maurice Thomson. His career makes an amazing story. Born in the Home Counties about 1600, the eldest of five brothers, Thomson emigrated to Virginia in his teens, where he soon became a ship’s captain, acquired land, and entered the ...”

“... the influence of his other great mentor and guide when a young man, the Australian priest Peter Thomson, who became Blair’s closest friend and confidant while he was an undergraduate at Oxford. When Thomson died earlier this year, Blair said at his funeral: ‘There are few people of whom you can say: he changed my ...”