“... action was nothing new, particularly in time of war, but no power had ever formally espoused such means as an arm of peacetime policy before. Forsaking the traditional intelligence role of attempting to discover what was really happening, the CIA from the outset saw one of its main tasks as making things happen. By 1953 it had already grown to six times its ...”

“... pen into the noisome ink of the Hollywood gossip-monger, until he himself stinks of the odours he means us to associate with the Kennedys. Wills leads us into the world of Presidential power by the back door. Mimicking a Norman Mailer or a Frank Sinatra, he creates a world of booze and balls and broads and brawls which seems to be as seductive to him as it ...”

“... his line should sound. In Modernising Shakespeare’s Spelling Stanley Wells refers the reader to David Abercrombie’s paper ‘A Phonetician’s View of Verse Structure’ (1961), which is reprinted in Abercrombie’s Studies in Phonetics and Linguistics (Oxford, 1965). Wells follows Abercrombie in arguing that ‘the basis of the structure of English ...”

“... on moral as well as pragmatic grounds. Mr Kaufman, it is true, comes up with one or two novel means of striking back at privatisation. There are, as he says, certain areas where public bodies like local authorities enjoy considerable expertise which might be turned to profitable enterprises. Their gardeners, for example, could surely enter the ...”

“... and soulful actor. Harriet, sitting at home in a state of ‘profound despondency’, and by no means aware of her part in the genesis of the entertainment, allowed herself to accept tickets for the Grand Concert Dramatique donné par M. Hector Berlioz where the Fantastique (‘Episode de la vie d’un artiste’) was to be followed by the premiere of ...”

“... which had two interdependent components. The first was monetarism. Lawson is not afraid to quote David Hume in asserting the fundamental relation between the quantity of money in circulation and the level of prices in the economy as a whole. He tells us that he was converted by the accelerating rate of price increases in the late Sixties and early Seventies ...”

“... Williams’s five boys. In April 1994 Maxine had left the family home she shared with her husband David Handley in Newark Knok, and taken the kids to live at the house of her boyfriend Alex Joseph, at Lobelia Close in Beckton. Daniel went to Beckton Cross primary school, and was one of those kids who’d talk to anyone. He already had girlfriends, and was one ...”

“... fashion should be judged on the criterion of ‘beauty’. On the contrary, he claims, ‘it means to be dressed correctly.’ He condemns the cult of beauty expressed ‘in the form of velvet collars, aesthetic trouser fabric and Secessionist neckties’. Second, he praises Savile Row fashion as a model of its kind. In true Brummell style, Loos argues ...”

“... now meant enjoying a practised familiarity with expensive rare books and manuscripts. Despite David Garrick’s bequest of his impressive collection of Renaissance playbooks to the new British Museum in 1779, this effectively meant that to be a legitimate Shakespearean critic now required the independent means to own a ...”

“... knowing it. They are conjured into the midst of life to tell a modern truth by purely modern means. This is what a great artist has always known how to do, although usually not in such a wholly distinctive medium. Cartier-Bresson’s was photo-reportage, later to shift into portrait-photo-reportage, documentary film and photojournalism, all of this a ...”

“... off as a ‘dull’ decade, repeating the clichéd and inaccurate suggestion that until Elizabeth David published her Book of Mediterranean Food no British person had used olive oil except as a cure for earache. Craxton, however, found England both dull and cold and from now on spent as much time as he could in Greece, where he faced the ‘unending ...”

“... the government put de Kooning’s Woman III up for sale. It was sold to the American billionaire David Geffen, and the proceeds were used to buy pages of the Houghton Shahnameh, a particularly magnificent edition of the Persian Book of Kings, that had been taken apart and sold as single leaves by a collector in the 1970s. The purchase satisfied nobody. Some ...”

“... much time in the city of Cluj, where she had formed a passionate friendship with the historian David Prodan. The Securitate meanwhile had decided that with a name like Verdery she must be an ethnic Hungarian (quite wrong: the family roots were French), and therefore had been planted to encourage subversion among the disaffected Magyar minority in ...”

“... SIVs. At least some of these cultures also employed chimpanzee sera to nourish the cells, which means there was substantial potential for recombination (the exchange of fragments of DNA) between different SIV strains in vitro. It has also been claimed, for instance by a group of researchers led by Beatrice Hahn, Bette Korber and Paul Sharp, that Aids could ...”

“... involves the contrast between the work published in her lifetime – which seems so aware, as David Kalstone put it, ‘of the smallness and dignity of human observation and contrivance’ – and the pain and disorder of her often very messy life. Born in 1911, Bishop was effectively orphaned as a small child: her father died before she was one; in ...”