“... Modernism and non-Western image-making, to create subtle, layered masterpieces. On Bribie Island, north of Brisbane, ‘Fairweather had set himself up off the main road,’ Bail writes, ‘a mile or two from the shops and post office. A bushfire had swallowed his tent and all of his belongings ... if he painted at night it would be with the erratic assistance ...”

“... this complex web of interests and arriving at a settlement will not be easy. According to John Stockwell, who ran the CIA’s covert programme in Angola during the Seventies, it was the Agency which laid the first stone in what is now an edifice of superpower rivalry. In Stockwell’s account, the Americans began funding the FNLA, one of three ...”

“... away on the ship that was taking her home; was discovered, court-martialled and banished to the North-West Frontier. She was staying with her parents in the country when she heard his death announced on the Six O’clock News. Back in London, she finds a last letter from him, which she quotes – and that’s the end of him, he isn’t mentioned again. It ...”

“... more right-wing than is generally thought’. His hero is America’s Greatest Liar, Oliver North. He engages in constant ‘telephone terrorism’ against his editors, reducing supposedly hard men like Kelvin MacKenzie and David Montgomery to stammering wrecks and causing Patsy Chapman, the editor of the News of the World, to suffer a nervous ...”

“... lives. She speaks of the London press as ‘evil and morally corrupt’. From Whitbread winner to John Knox in four easy weeks. Even the friendlier Scottish papers were apt to harp on rags-to-riches, overnight success. Commentators should take this truth to heart: no novelist ever has an overnight success. Atkinson has been writing for fifteen years, and it ...”

“... and complained in 1901 that he had offered himself unsuccessfully to every physicist ‘from the North Sea to the southern tip of Italy’. It was from a clerk’s post in the Bern patent office that the 26-year-old, still without a doctorate, wrote the four papers that transformed our understanding of the physical universe. Yet they were also very different ...”

“... under German control with German bases; the Netherlands as well; perhaps some choice pieces of the north of France. But it was in the east that the imaginations of the German elites were really let loose. Even Bethmann-Hollweg, usually seen as a moderate, planned to annex a large strip of Russian Poland and deport the local inhabitants, Jews and Poles ...”

“... The supposed military success has revived the previously languishing campaign of the hawkish John McCain, who will now almost certainly be his party’s candidate for the presidency. Seldom has the official Iraqi and American perception of what is happening in Iraq felt so different from the reality. Barricaded behind the walls of the Green ...”

“... may suggest, the level of sheer verbal force and arresting cadence is abnormally high. His friend John Sterling registered these characteristics when he thanked him for two recent letters ‘which, unlike other people’s, have the writer’s signature in every word as well as at the end’. The project to collect, edit and publish all known letters by ...”

“... involves placing Asia and the rising sun at the top and disregarding the compass point of the North. Once in India, Roe had to quickly reconsider the likelihood of England’s being feared as ‘a terror to all nations’. The Mughal emperor ruled around a hundred million people. A few years earlier, an EIC merchant called William Hawkins had fairly ...”

“... have been then about forty. He was born in 1900. I think I was about twelve when we moved to the North. After the war he was on short contracts all around the place and was rarely at home. Then – in 1951 – came this opportunity to get a longer contract in Darlington, County Durham. So he moved the whole family up there and proceeded to die less than a ...”

“... head shining above the water as the sun goes down over drilling rigs beached by the receding North Sea tide. The magazine Management Today has developed a distinctive style of portrait photography in recent years. Here is a constant stream of successful business figures, but here also is a problematic redundancy of appearance: how can one promote the ...”

“... for the title sequence of a slowly unravelling murder mystery. Snyder grew up on a stump farm just north of Seattle. He delivered milk for his father. He learned how to chop wood, how to use a two-handled saw. Tools were important to him, the right kit for the right job. In Kitkitdizze, there are tools everywhere, racks and stacks of them, useful objects ...”

“... friend of Patrick’s, he talked mostly to him, but Princess Margaret didn’t confine herself to John Gielgud and Paul Eddington but to her credit wanted to meet the boys in the play, which she did, though I suspect most of them had no idea who she was. In 1984 Snowdon took pictures of me for (I think) the Sunday Times after the shooting of A Private ...”

“... Klein and Pettis hark back to the classic study of imperialism published by the British economist John Hobson in 1902, in the wake of the Boer War. Hobson’s work inspired Lenin’s understanding of the First World War as an outgrowth of imperialist competition but, unlike Lenin, Hobson refused to accept that financial rivalry must inevitably lead to ...”