“... lessons when turning the camera on blemishless characters like the Justice for Janitors activist Sam (Adrien Brody) in Bread and Roses, or George in Carla’s Song, or for that matter any of the salt of the earth Sandinistas in that movie. These are not people, they’re mirages of purity conjured up to indict an unfair world, just as the sneering, sadistic ...”

“... government jobs. What with the anonymous cruising sites of Lafayette Park (right in front of the White House) and the company of tolerant female colleagues in the federal bureaucracy, homosexuals managed to turn Washington into a ‘very gay city’. Hoover grew up in DC when it was a racist backwater of the Old South, and despite his own ambiguous ...”

“... both houses of Congress, the NSC, three departments (State, Defense, Homeland Security) and the White House, and in Europe, Nato. Binyamin Netanyahu and Tzipi Livni are among his interlocutors in the Middle East. Most passages in Talking to the Enemy are intended for us, ordinary readers, but some are clearly meant for those in power. Like a lot of ...”

“... him. Keeping Giuliani away from the boss had long been a key task for the gatekeepers of the Trump White House: lawyers, aides and family members. But once the gatekeepers were gone, Giuliani could say what he liked and be sure of an audience. He told Trump that the way to fight back was to take his case to the courts, and ultimately to the Supreme ...”

“... the classicist Daniel Mendelsohn in the New York Review of Books, who attacked its reliance on white space, on aura. The Sappho of the best-known surviving stanzas was a poet, a singer, whose work Carson tried to re-create, but the Sappho in much of If Not, Winter was (he implied) an illusion, a ghostly projection of our collective relationship to ...”

“... were established to promote creationism. But it was during Carter’s unhappy term in the White House that Jerry Falwell and others built the national political organisations that were to become the vehicles of the religious right. When Reagan was elected in November 1980, the long exile of evangelicals from Washington had come to an end. It would be ...”

“... but also reflecting an incipient musical integration. ‘Country and western is the music of the white masses,’ one contemporary soul musician says to Booth. ‘Rhythm and blues is the music of the Negro masses. Today soul music is becoming the music of all the people.’ But Booth sits in on a 20th-anniversary concert tribute to Stax, and finds that the ...”

“... while his studio team and friends look on; Isabella Blow and the Chapman Brothers are there, and Sam Taylor-Wood (as was), as well as the jeweller Shaun Leane, and Sarah Burton, who would take over the label after his death and made Kate Middleton’s wedding dress. All McQueen’s earliest associates seemed to have stayed with him the whole way: this was a ...”

“... The Stranger (1946) – a frankly commercial production which Welles made for another independent, Sam Spiegel – was the first Hollywood feature to refer to the Nazi death camps, and used newsreel clips. The movie, in which Welles hams shamelessly as a German war criminal hiding out in a New England college town, was severely cut. Callow compares its lost ...”

“... of physical (rather than psychic) survival, a filing error in the bureaucracy of the afterlife. Sam in Ghost, looking down at his own corpse after an attack in the street, comes to realise that his job is still to protect his girlfriend, Molly. He loves her too much to be able to leave her. In Vigil, Jill’s marriage was loving, but she doesn’t stay on ...”

“... still travelling in the wake of Little Richard. The history of rock ’n’ roll focuses on the white triumvirate – Presley, Buddy Holly and Jerry Lee Lewis, who have at different times heaped contumely on themselves – neglecting its roots in Jazz and the Blues, and a sibling relationship with Soul. Along the way, that history has appropriated the music ...”

“... works the possibilities of dialogue literally translated from the French, and of a Southern poor-white narrative style: ‘There’s this European painter that paints people with big holes in them, holes as big as windows where you see the clear blue sky and white clouds through their thoracic regions, though Marl ...”

“... casting vote. Sugar’s nod for Sky gave Murdoch’s company the majority it needed. It was, as Sam Chisholm, former chief executive of BSkyB, acknowledged, the ‘turning point’ for Sky. By 1993, a running deficit of £47 million had been turned round to a £62 million profit; in 1994 profits rose to £170 million, in 1995 to £237 million. By 1996, Sky ...”

“... with Jeff Eggers, another former SEAL and a special assistant for national security at the Obama White House. It had a foreword by Walter Isaacson, then head of the Aspen Institute, which receives substantial funding from Saudi Arabia and the United Arab Emirates, and has been described by the Economist as ‘a cross between a think tank, a celebrity ...”

“... chances: his affairs with Judith Campbell Exner, who was also the girlfriend of the mobster Sam Giancana, and with Ellen Rometsch, who was believed to be an East German spy and had to be spirited out of the country. His recklessness was far greater than Bill Clinton’s (Dallek found that Kennedy, too, had an affair with a ...”