“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... serving); Federer’s peacocking entrances to Centre Court (at the 2009 championships he wore a white and gold monogrammed safari suit to every match). Professional tennis requires extraordinary psychological capacities – obsessive focus, epic self-belief – so it would be surprising if the players at the top were perfectly well adjusted. Being motivated ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... outlier. The old mad master of abstract expressionism, Hans Hofmann, had two successive shows at Sam Kootz’s gallery in 1958 and 1959, first of recent work in high colour, and second of paintings drawn from his long career, the retrospective (selected by Clement Greenberg) opening in the same month as Eight American Painters. Lee Krasner had a show of new ...”

“... so badly burned that he wanted nothing to do with it. When he came under strong Congressional and White House pressure to start a new Red hunt in 1930, he argued that such a thing was strictly illegal – and since the agitators were mainly in the unions, wouldn’t it be better to hand the whole thing over to the Department of Labor? The project quietly ...”

“... ones. You wouldn’t confuse Lerner’s voice or his plot structures with Jonathan Franzen’s or Sam Lipsyte’s or Benjamin Kunkel’s. But in moments of high capering, Ben and Adam can seem to be iterations of a collective character we’ve met in other novels of the last twenty years. As 19th-century Russians fight duels and gamble, late 20th and ...”

“... And she formed a corporate board ready to go to war with Quest and LabCorp: Henry Kissinger; Sam Nunn, who had served as chairman of the Senate Armed Services Committee; George Shultz, the former secretary of state, one of the begetters of the Bush doctrine of pre-emptive war; William Perry, the former US secretary of defence; James Mattis, Trump’s ...”

“... in high-class soap operas like Upstairs, Downstairs. In Grosvenor Square today, the Uncle Sam who lords it over the west side is not some latterday Courtauld relative, but a very different creature altogether. Lady Bracknell might be mollified to learn that Mayfair retains its high status and exclusive reputation: but the riches and power to which it ...”

“... lifelike head of the Motion Picture Association of America – one-time former fixer in the LBJ White House, recently chair of the Hollywood summit to discuss ways of supporting the war against terrorism – curdled our blood twenty years ago with similar threats. ‘The growing and dangerous intrusion of this new technology is to the American film producer ...”

“... or at least has done since 1913 – Bordwell offers us an illustration from a film called Red and White Roses, released in that year. Of course, not even Bazin was arguing that montage was all bad, or that films could or should abandon it entirely, and the idea that film history consists of battles between the two approaches is as rigid and unhandy as the ...”

“... a writer to tolerate even minor flaws.’Annotations to James Joyce’s ‘Ulysses’ by Sam Slote, Marc Mamigonian and John Turner takes on board all the research and scholarship done since Don Gifford’s groundbreaking Notes for Joyce (1974, revised and republished in 1988 as Ulysses Annotated by Don Gifford with Robert J. Seidman). It shows Joyce ...”

“... 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 desk was in a booth by a low wall that separated me from John’s secretary, the formidable RoseMarie Terenzio. John depended on no one more than RoseMarie. ‘Here’s the ...”