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“... War super-border dividing Europe for half a century after the Second World War – the subject of Timothy Phillips’s The Curtain and the Wall. The postwar settlement had left the Soviet Union, including Soviet Ukraine, separated from the West by a buffer of East European states that extended as far as the GDR. In 2019, ...”

“... that for South Africans ‘the rugby scrum was symbolic of the laager,’ John Nauright and Timothy Chandler enter the reservation that ‘such notions can be taken too far.’ Indeed they can. An inward-facing huddle of wagons, their occupants locked in some obscure struggle of their own, would have presented little problem to a marauding Zulu ...”

“... left after their time is over. Some account of the organic nature of tennis is missing from Caryl Phillips’s rather too random compilation, The Right Set: The Faber Book of Tennis, which I had looked forward to reading as an anthology that starts with Suzanne Lenglen and ends more or less with Venus Williams. The game’s tissue, if you will, is almost ...”

“... and doing his own writing. There are wonderful descriptions of the famous and the infamous – Timothy Leary, Warhol, Ginsberg, Charles Laughton, Truman Capote, Natalie Wood, Thom Gunn, the Reagans, Leslie Caron, Nehru – but it’s their performance that’s gossiped about, not their morals. When he describes people it’s as if he’s making notes for ...”

“... received a total of £7500 for 39 tips: he told the paper about the theft of a handbag from Zara Phillips, and about Hans Rausing’s failure to stop after a traffic accident. Flattley’s handler, the Sun’s defence editor, Virginia Wheeler, made no secret of her source when she asked the paper’s news editors for cash. ‘Please could I get a £500 cash ...”

“... the Opportunity of our Times (2004), an early dirge about the waning of Anglo-American power, Timothy Garton Ash approvingly quoted a Canadian friend as saying that the trouble with Britain is that ‘it doesn’t know what story it wants to tell.’ This was certainly true of New Labour, which had invested heavily in storytelling and spin as substitutes ...”