“... son to prolong his legacy. For the men who came to rule the United States with the inauguration of George W. Bush, the Syrian menace was nothing new. Some of them had long wanted to wage war against Iraq as a way of containing Syria. ‘Israel can shape its strategic environment, in co-operation with Turkey and Jordan, by weakening, containing and even rolling ...”

“... Vacation, Driving Miss Daisy and The War of the Roses (starring Michael Douglas and Kathleen Turner). Roger and Me may not have done quite the same at the box office as these big hitters – $6.7 million dollars in the US, as against more than $100 million for Driving Miss Daisy – but given that it only cost $140,000 to make, this was a huge return. It ...”

“... independence and British devolution.At the heart of Bucknell’s book is an examination of Francis Turner Palgrave’s Golden Treasury of the Best Songs and Lyrical Poems in the English Language (1861), which Ezra Pound denounced three-quarters of a century later as a ‘stinking sugar teat’, but which sold very well from the outset and, as Bucknell points ...”

“... stride for stride in hallucinatory ordinariness, the celebrated living sculptures, Gilbert and George. It’s an English spring afternoon and they have dressed for it in country formal outfits: stout boots, long, brown chequerboard coats with too many buttons, furry headwarmers that flap down over their ears. They look worried – like posh herdsmen who ...”

“... George Baroli and I were soaked to the skin. We sat on a wooden bench in the rain, a green bottle of sherry sat between us. George stared straight ahead most of the time, tilting the bottle up to his mouth with both hands, getting it into position, holding it there, and breathing through his nose ...”

“... was born 30 November 1908, third child and second son of Henry Brooke and his wife Mary, née Turner, the youngest of the family by ten years or more. Both his grandfathers had been wine merchants, also his father, who had started life as a solicitor. Brooke’s elder brother, after ten years as a regular officer in the Royal East Kent Regiment, The ...”

“... strongly critical of some of his appointments, especially of ‘internationalists’ such as George H.W. Bush, James Baker and Caspar Weinberger. Weinberger was one of the few figures in the administration to show concern about white extremism. Reagan only made matters worse by allying himself with Jewish neoconservatives, who his far-right critics ...”

“... of Being Earnest was to open on 14 February. Wilde attended rehearsals, and was persuaded by George Alexander, the actor-manager, who was producing the play and performing in it, to drop the act in which Algernon is almost arrested for debt. This play, too, was a huge success, with both critics and audiences. ‘Oscar Wilde,’ the New York Times ...”

“... lowered over precipices into the void, so he could create the vertiginous, eagle-eye look – like Turner lashed to the mast in a storm, to record the scene of an imminent capsize. Muybridge was recommended to Stanford to prove the point about the trotting horse in 1872. Their association was to last nine years, during which Stanford provided the private ...”

“... to high-class anthropology, including the inspiring Africanist work of the British Catholic Victor Turner. He also made me read Erich Auerbach’s Mimesis, an extraordinary account of the history of ‘representation’ in the West from Homer to Proust. Our favourite class was a joint seminar on the fiction of Indonesia’s great writer Pramoedya Ananta ...”

“... had a ‘post-Morrision’ beauty, Archer wrote. Above the fireplace there was an engraving by Turner of the Bell Rock. Two Piranesi etchings were nearby, along with portraits of Shelley and Mary Wollstonecraft. There was a selection of blue china plates, which James admired for their colour and their secret stories. In the drawing room, multiple small ...”

“... role in what was supposed to be a French war from an impeccable source – the CIA. George Allen worked on Indochina from 1949 to 1975, by far the longest involvement of any American, a fly on the wall at the decisions of a quarter-century. Allen is a real-life quiet American who saw his job as answering the questions he was asked, without ...”

“... in, the movies imported everybody from the theatre who knew anything at all about how to speak,’ George Cukor said. ‘It was like the parting of the Red Sea and they allowed a lot of people in.’ This expansion of personnel and technological innovation required a huge investment and major reorganisation of the business model into the much more hierarchical ...”

“... do what Baldwin’s friend Eugene Worth did in 1946: he will finally jump to his death off the George Washington Bridge. Baldwin later said that there were no fictional antecedents for Rufus: ‘He was in the novel because I don’t think anyone had ever watched the disintegration of a black boy from that particular point of view. Rufus was partly ...”

“... article.*More curiously, Christine Borland, one of the artists shortlisted for this year’s Turner Prize, has as one part of her exhibition at the Tate Gallery an installation devoted to the Sicilian Dwarf and the Irish Giant. The installation is called After a True Story – Giant and Fairy Tales, and is made up of four pieces, one on each wall. There ...”