“... the past itself can lodge a ‘thorn in the spirit’. ‘All children,’ according to Alice Miller (or at least according to her obituary, which appeared as I was writing this review), ‘suffer trauma and permanent psychic scarring at the hands of parents.’ How trauma made its initial move from exteriority to interiority doesn’t much concern Didier ...”

“... Hamlet’ has a more absolute meaning. In an early allusion, the writer of an elegy for Richard Burbage after his death in 1619 names his great roles as     young Hamlett, ould Hieronymoe, Kind Leer, the Greved More – where Hamlet is young as Lear is kind and the Moor grieved. The phrase, which may have been regular in use, gives a valuable ...”

“... friend. There was a sort of troika: Jocelyn Stevens, who’d bought it, Mark Boxer and Beatrix Miller, who was brought in as the editor, and who later edited Vogue. She was the one who had any sense, and Mark had all the impatient brilliant ideas. Mark asked would I be their theatre critic. I was always put behind a pillar on the second night. I don’t ...”

“... Russia Modernise?, Fiona Hill and Clifford Gaddy’s Mr Putin: Operative in the Kremlin (2013) and Richard Sakwa’s Putin Redux (2014). New Year’s Eve 1999 – when Yeltsin appeared on Russian TV screens to announce his resignation as president in favour of Putin – is often taken to mark a major turning point, from the ‘fevered 1990s’ to the stability ...”

“... of lynchers’, turned to it for inspiration, drawing on the work of Black writers such as Richard Wright and Chester Himes. America is a ‘battlefield’, Simone de Beauvoir wrote, ‘and you can only become passionate about the battle it is waging with itself, in which the stakes are beyond measure.’Since Beauvoir made this observation in 1947, at ...”

“... new wave of furious proselytising for atheism (which includes not just Hitchens but people like Richard Dawkins and Daniel Dennett) is just another surrogate religion is a familiar one. It’s what the God-botherers always say about the God-bashers. But in the case of Christopher Hitchens it’s not entirely convincing. The ...”

“... understood the way national security blurs the line between the possible and the actual than Richard Perle. ‘How far Saddam’s gone on the nuclear weapons side I don’t think we really know,’ Perle said on one occasion. ‘My guess is it’s further than we think. It’s always further than we think, because we limit ourselves, as we think about ...”

“... colony. We have a programme and a list of guests. Jeremy Treglown is there, but where are Richard Gere and Bernardo Bertolucci? Where is Kurt Vonnegut? The bus sizzles along wet roads flanked by blackened chunks of Kendal Mint Cake and we debuss at the tiny Peredelkino church, where a service for Pasternak is to be held. The choir has not yet arrived ...”

“... million masks a day to the US. He received no response.The president says: ‘I learned a lot from Richard Nixon … I study history.’With the high rate of infections and deaths among Native Americans, Doctors without Borders is sending teams into the Navajo Nation, where healthcare is gravely inadequate. In South Dakota, the Cheyenne River Sioux set up ...”

“... branches in the Bettys chain) no longer does organic produce as they’ve changed their flour miller. ‘However,’ she assures me, ‘the flour is locally produced.’ As are, presumably, its pesticide residues. When I ask why the flour could not be locally produced and nevertheless be organic she cannot explain. Money is, I imagine, the short answer ...”

“... move, part of a Saudi-UAE effort to counter what they present as Iranian influence. As Richard Sokolsky and Aaron David Miller put it in an article for Politico, The crown prince engineered this dispute not to punish Qatar for its financing of terrorism (a hypocritical comment coming from the Saudis, whose own ...”

“... that the margarita was invented, here that Hollywood stars used to come, Marilyn Monroe and Arthur Miller or Liz Taylor and Richard Burton, for a quickie divorce followed by a huge party, or a discreet abortion. ‘Juárez’s bad reputation goes back thirty years,’ says Arnulfo Gómez, the owner of the Gato Félix, on the ...”

“... response was ‘Now, jump out with me, Ba!’ And of course, miraculously, she did. J. Hillis Miller plausibly speculated that part of the fascination of Miss Barrett was her very inaccessibility, ‘immured in darkness and jealously guarded’: in Browning’s imagination her liberation assumed an operatic immensity, like the prisoners blinking into the ...”

“... Cohn protégé who began his political career as a dirty trickster and ‘ratfucker’ for Richard Nixon’s re-election campaign in 1972, explained the relationship. ‘First of all,’ he told an interviewer, ‘Roy would literally call up and dictate pieces for Page Six [of the New York Post] because Rupert [Murdoch] was a client and because Roy ...”

“... East Policy (WINEP); Dennis Ross, who joined WINEP after leaving government in 2001; and Aaron Miller, who has lived in Israel and often visits the country. These men were among Clinton’s closest advisers at the Camp David summit in July 2000. Although all three supported the Oslo peace process and favoured the creation of a Palestinian state, they did ...”