“... speaker’s click brings up the next slide. On the page we are out of his or her control, and we may get stuck or distracted. The idea that it is possible, desirable even, to arrive at a single winning set of cards, even at an agreed set of artists, has gone. Success lies in finding sequences that carry a narrative, although the notion that there is only one ...”

“... then would have swived the other sister both’. He fought for the invading Tudor forces against Richard III. Unsubstantiated legend has him as a standard-bearer at Bosworth, cut down close to the person of the man who would soon be king. Whatever the exact truth, he died a hero with a claim on the gratitude of the new regime. He did not leave much land for ...”

“... of the Maharishi kicking in, and then out, it would all have taken on another dimension still. You may not have remained at one with the universe, but somehow the erstwhile notion that you became it by being part of it, then all of it, and that it became you in microcosm, would have left you feeling that immense forces were in play when you tried to figure out ...”

“... flow.The problem is compounded by the often contrasting forms of competence in play. One writer may be an accomplished biographer, but without any real expertise in the field in which their current subject worked. Another may be a fellow specialist working on the same material and issues as their subject, but lacking any ...”

“... with the infirmities of old age.’ She is indeed ready to die, and it is a difficulty that Justin may feel that he has to do the same. In the Sudan she declares: ‘My time is up.’ She is infatuated with a handsome police chief, goes rather grimly to bed with him in the time he can spare from gambling sessions, and then kills herself. Justin goes back to ...”

“... went ape.’ This view is challenged in the other immediate response to the 2013-14 events, Richard Sakwa’s Frontline Ukraine. Sakwa has reservations about the 2004 Orange Revolution; the question of whether it was a people’s revolution or a revolutionary coup ‘remains pertinent to this day’. The Maidan uprising began as a protest against the ...”

“... centre which Wertham opened in a church basement in Harlem in 1946 with help from Ellison and Richard Wright. Six years later Wertham was called as an expert witness for the NAACP in one of the cases reviewed in Brown v. Board of Education. With the evidence of his experiences treating traumatised children in Harlem, he persuaded a federal judge that ...”

“... Palantir’s technology work? Even those at the company weren’t sure. When Obama announced in May 2011 that US special forces had tracked down and killed Osama bin Laden, employees at Palantir asked their bosses: was this us? What they got back was a nod and a wink and a ‘maybe’. That was enough to get the press speculating that the company’s AI ...”

“... allowing every potential show of principle to appear like a fluttering of small resentments. It may be the chief characteristic of the Windsor dynasty, this ability to make grand things small. The Poet Laureate, Andrew Motion, wrote a poem for the wedding which rather effectively takes them out of the great tide of history and into the more local business ...”

“... behind by More. At times, he seems to have known exactly what lay ahead. In his History of King Richard III (1513), he wrote that ‘kings’ games ... were stage plays, and for the more part played upon scaffolds.’ The ‘More part’, indeed. At other times, only we, in retrospect, can see how the ironies of this life buckle. Who else could have ...”

“... is down to the fact that he has been off training with an injury for a couple of months. This may be so; but the truth is he if anything looks a bit thinner than he has done playing for Real Madrid in the last couple of seasons. I think he’s a bit porky for no other reason than that he likes his pies. I also think there is something noble about a ...”

“... Sisman has now studied three: Taylor, Hugh Trevor-Roper and Briggs, leaving only Eric Hobsbawm to Richard Evans. Briggs’s widow, Susan, commissioned Sisman to write this Life, and in fact the man himself noted before his death in 2016 that if there had to be a biography, Sisman would be the right person to do it. The result is an elaborately detailed and ...”

“... Trade Center, the harbour beyond and then the American continent. During Fleet Week, at the end of May, a US aircraft carrier group would dock at the Midtown piers – the carrier seemed to dwarf the Twin Towers. Looking down at the streets below, you could see lines of sailors in white uniforms looking like trains of ants weaving their way into the city. My ...”

“... set within a shopping mall, Grand Central, which blurs into another shopping mall, the Bull Ring. Richard Vinen, writing the first serious history of Birmingham in a long while, is aware of how hard it is to pin the city down, to explain what it is or what it is for. Planners in the 1960s, he says, ‘were sometimes perplexed as to why Birmingham had been ...”

“... child? Leaving Carol, my 80-year-old mother and my daughter relatively secure in the cars, my son Richard and I plunged down the hill, going from hut to hut asking for the little girl. Directed ever further down we soon found ourselves accompanied – ‘surrounded’ does more justice to the tenseness of the situation – by a crowd of young men with ...”