“... us, makes American dreams come true without entailing corresponding responsibilities. Because Richard Nixon needed to issue orders, a ‘smoking gun’ tied him to Watergate. The question Senator Howard Baker had asked, ‘What did the President know and when did he know it,’ which Baker hoped would exculpate ...”

“... Gable’ for their tours on the Dark Continent. The person I’d prefer to look like is Trevor Howard, the epitome of Mr Sensible, even with his kneecaps bared, but I’ve a feeling W&G can stretch to this. They’ll also be able to sort me out with a pair of ‘strong shoes for walking’ – trainers, says the guide, or desert boots, although I’ll be ...”

“... The ‘raft of laws’ of which he now disapproves seems to have emanated exclusively from Michael Howard, when the Government was already on its last legs. Alexander’s book is a compelling account of what the powerful in our society now mean by democracy; his is the authentic voice of post-democratic liberalism and his version of democracy both mirrors and ...”

“... was also the first ‘public war’, covered by correspondents and shot by photographers. William Howard Russell’s reports in the Times told the public the truth about the war, to the rage of the generals. This ‘vulgar low Irishman’, who ‘drinks anyone’s brandy and water, and smokes as many cigars as foolish young officers will let him’, was ...”

“... Richard Holmes published Shelley: The Pursuit in 1974. More than a decade later, in Footsteps: Adventures of a Romantic Biographer (1985), he recalled how obsessive his engagement gradually became, not just with Shelley, but with that whole group of English expatriates associated with him, as it moved from Geneva through Italy – Bagni di Lucca, Este, Venice, Rome, Naples, Ravenna, Pisa – shedding some members and adding others, before finally disintegrating when Shelley and Edward Williams were drowned off Leghorn in July 1822 ...”

“... to bring countries together than any number of EU directives.’ He quotes another political hero, Richard Cobden, the Manchester textile manufacturer and Anti-Corn Law Leaguer, who described free trade as ‘God’s diplomacy’, not bothering to notice that in the case of the redundant cotton weavers of Bengal, the casualties of cheap Lancashire cloth, God ...”

“... a dilettante and in the doldrums about cracking the code of American musical success, Porter told Richard Rodgers: ‘I’ll write Jewish tunes.’ In Porter’s shift to the heavily chromatic minor key with its unmistakable Mediterranean flavour, he found a rhythmic correlative which engineered the crossover to Broadway. ‘It is surely one of the ironies of ...”

“... turreted instance of what Pevsner calls the ‘Loire style’. It was built for Richard D’Oyly Carte in the late 1880s and its interior was a vision of marble and velvet. Conceived as a full-blown opera house, it was a commercial failure and its successful reinvention as the Palace Theatre of Varieties, an upmarket music hall, reflected ...”

“... to all the greats and also the less than greats’. He spoke about his original canon – Howard Hawks, Alfred Hitchcock, Bresson, Rossellini – but also about recent films such as Alien: Resurrection (‘inventive, honest and frank’) and Paul Verhoeven’s Starship Troopers (‘I’ve seen it twice and I like it a lot’).At some point I wrote a ...”

“... slow swing replaced by a nocturne. The station cut in again with a learned authority, ‘Professor Richard Pierson, famous astronomer’, direct from the Princeton observatory to explain the discharge and point out that Mars could not support intelligent life. Pierson, however, confessed that he could not explain the regularity of the emissions. More ...”

“... down and going down, though there’s no doubt which one the audience prefers. 22 January. Take Richard Buckle’s autobiography, The Most Upsetting Woman, out of the London Library in order to refresh my memory of the Diaghilev exhibition in 1954. Buckle had organised it and put it on first at the Edinburgh Festival (a much smarter venue then than it is ...”

“... with an even hand, it came to the only realistic decision that a competent lawyer could come to. Howard Youngerwood, the Assistant Chief Prosecutor responsible for the Lawrence prosecution, was harassed by the public at the Lawrence Inquiry before he out-victimed them in describing his own experience as a Jew of racism in this country. He also received ...”

“... hidden’ for almost seventy years. Tawadros was said to have sold the stele just a decade after Howard Carter discovered Tutankhamun’s tomb, and just eight years after he revealed the gold funerary mask. These were global events. Audiences in both Cairo and London were enthralled by the excavation. The Times managed to secure an exclusive deal for press ...”

“... Twomblys, accidental Jackson Pollocks, accidental works by Eva Hesse or Louise Bourgeois or Richard Tuttle or Jean-Michel Basquiat. (See recent coup to the right: an accidental Philip Guston. Guston’s 1968 painting Boot is above, and below a CE artist’s picture, now in my collection, of an eight-fingered glove.) At such moments, you not only feel ...”

“... in Early Modern Europe’ is a critique of Michel Foucault. An interesting article by Howard Nenner on 1688 criticises the view that Whigs and Tories were agreed in using the occasion to impose conditions on William III: rather, he argues, the Convention Parliament was hamstrung by collective uneasiness about what could be done constitutionally in ...”