“... from Bernie Sanders that question wouldn’t be surprising. But it was more remarkable to hear William Barr, Trump’s attorney general, describe American business as ‘part of the problem’ because its corporate leaders are too focused on their stock options and have lost sight of the ‘national view’ and the need to ensure that ‘that the next ...”

“... feeling of working against time ... We walked with the utmost care between the narrowly placed white tape lines that marked the mine-cleared path, and headed for a tent marked with a Red Cross ... The dust that rose in the grey night light seemed like the fog of war itself. Then it was perhaps the most surprising of all the day’s surprises to smell the ...”

“... for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) in Atlanta learned of a case of Aids in a 62-year-old, white, married haemophiliac. Aids had only just been recognised as some sort of, as yet mysterious, immune deficiency syndrome and until this case it seemed to have infected exclusively sexually promiscuous gays and Haitians. Six months later, there were two more ...”

“... in the lobby of the Paris Ritz minutes before her death; O.J. Simpson’s ‘live’ escape in the white Bronco. The Omagh bombing was enhanced as a terrifyingly real tragedy when home footage appeared. The drama of Holly Wells and Jessica Chapman’s disappearance was heightened when CCTV footage appeared of the girls crossing a sports club car park in Soham ...”

“... its role in strengthening the North’s position in negotiations with the US. The New York Times White House reporter David Sanger has published so many ‘scoops’ from US Intelligence that some of his colleagues just call him ‘Scoop’. Unfortunately, quite a few have been wrong. Sanger has been particularly good at omitting all the CIA’s ...”

“... Six weeks​ after President George W. Bush launched what the White House called a Global War on Terror, in October 2001, the journalist Bob Woodward asked the vice president, Dick Cheney, when the war would end. ‘Not in our lifetime,’ Cheney said. One can picture his barely suppressed smirk, a facial tic familiar from interviews ...”

“... in the windows in the hope that she’ll wake up and enliven a dull hour of their beat. Tonight a white car reverses dramatically up the street, screeches to a halt beside the van and a burly young man jumps out and gives the van a terrific shaking. Assuming (hoping, probably) he would have driven off by the time I get outside, I find he’s still there, and ...”

“... racism. Emecheta manages this indirectly, by telling the story of Adah’s friend Janet, a white girl married to another Nigerian student, Babalola. Babalola first met Janet while standing outside a phone booth waiting for her to finish a call. ‘It started to drizzle and he was getting soaked to the skin, so he banged on the kiosk door, and shook his ...”

“... concentrate the universe in themselves,’ the Chilean liberal Francisco Bilbao complained after William Walker’s 1856 invasion of Nicaragua, where he brought back slavery years after it had been abolished: ‘The Yankee replaces the American; Roman patriotism, philosophy; wealth, morality; and self-interest, justice.’ When Washington attempted, at the ...”

“... Marxist professors and anti-psychiatrists – turned out en masse for the symposium; John Cage and William Burroughs came along; and Foucault flew in from Paris. It quickly became a circus.Deleuze and Guattari had long envied American writers like Henry Miller and Allen Ginsberg, with their ‘gift for ...”

“... then – I shouldn’t be hungry for it, you know.”’ From this perspective, the White Queen is speaking beguiling sense as well as infuriating nonsense when she says: ‘The rule is, jam tomorrow and jam yesterday – but never jam today.’ Alice becomes adept at finding ways to stay hungry. She’s never more gleeful than when she sneaks ...”

“... A painting​ in the National Portrait Gallery offers a grey-white face, long, guarded, medieval, remote: ‘unknown woman, formerly known as Margaret Pole, Countess of Salisbury’. It is painted on a dateable oak panel, and the dates suit the presumed subject, but the artist is anonymous. Where is Hans Holbein when you need him? The sitter might as well be carved, for all she suggests flesh or circulating blood ...”

“... CVs (typically quite selective) onto the narrative in a clumsy appendix. The contrast with William Taubman’s biography of Khrushchev – to take an obvious parallel – is painful.1 Taubman started out much more explicitly than Vogel with the intention of studying his subject from the angle of his relations with the US, but became so imaginatively ...”

“... point Milton is willing to ravish the senses rather than simply to suspect them. In Young Milton William Poole describes the 1645 volume as ‘a curious cacophony of radical and conservative voices, anxious to promote both his precocity and prophecy’. That seems exactly right: in this volume potentiality exceeds certainty, and that makes it exciting. It is ...”

“... announce imminent triumph for parties that then lost elections – most spectacularly in 1945. William Maxwell (‘Max’) Aitken, born in 1879, was a restless son of the manse. His father was a Church of Scotland minister from Torphichen, near Linlithgow, who ended up ‘called’ to a congregation in New Brunswick. Max grew up in a heavily Scottish ...”