“... constituted, fatal to all original undertakings of every kind. I never courted it then, when I was young and in high blood, and one of its ‘curled darlings’; and do you think I would do so now, when I am living in a clearer atmosphere? In assembling his symposium on Byron’s Political and Cultural Influence, Paul True-blood contributes to an intermediate ...”

“... from Covid-19 are older people, the lockdown is an intolerable encroachment on the liberty of the young. A more serious argument might ask where the limits of acceptable risk lie, or might consider – in a pandemic future – whether mass medical surveillance by the state, from automated temperature readings to contagion tracing by phone tracking, is worth ...”

“... failing to intercede on the victims’ behalf. This was the line taken in Massacre in Rome (and in Robert Katz’s book on which the film was based). Cosmatos and his producer, Carlo Ponti, were prosecuted for ‘defaming the memory of the pope’ and received six-month suspended sentences.Even more astonishing were the legal proceedings in 1994 against ...”

“... the Earl of Essex for treason in 1601 when the earl’s antagonist, the queen’s leading minister Robert Cecil, secretly present in the court, stepped from behind an arras to deliver the impassioned speech that ruined the earl’s defence of his rebellion? Which of the assumptions of disguise by beleaguered or lovelorn dramatis personae can have been as ...”

“... entirely appropriate to his base, the 35 to 40 per cent of the electorate who remain unmoved by Robert Mueller’s recent arrests. It also reflects an indisputable reality: the progressive erosion of checks and balances on presidential war-making power. The president is now understood as the sovereign who decides, not just for the United States, but, given ...”

“... on 22 October 4004 bc. Nor were ideas of ‘development’ new in themselves, and writers such as Robert Chambers, in his bestseller of the 1840s Vestiges of the Natural History of Creation, could run together an eclectic mix of geology, natural history and philosophical speculation to propose some kind of ‘evolutionary’ story. After 1859, Darwin’s name ...”

“... pathos of Expressionism’; Freud meets Strindberg, without the formal discipline of either. The young Loewenstein – who came to the Therapeutic Theatre complaining that his bourgeois parents did not understand him – fitted in straight away. It was Moreno who gave him his stage name, from an acquaintance called Peter and from the German word for ...”

“... Every year on 8 May, a young woman dressed in armour and carrying a white banner rides in procession through the streets of Orléans in north-central France. Dignitaries of Church and State join in commemorating an event and a life. The event is the French relief of the city, after months of siege by the English, in 1429; the life is that of Joan of Arc, a 17-year-old girl from Lorraine told by heavenly voices to go ‘into France’ and to rescue Orléans ...”

“... affairs. Kennan was glad to do so and invited several outsiders, including Reinhold Niebuhr and Robert Oppenheimer, to join him. They concluded that a sovereignty strong enough to calm French fears about Germany and resist what they took to be the threat of Soviet expansion would have to include the British and that the British, to maintain what they could ...”

“... In most cases the word in French simply means ‘manly’ or ‘masculine’, or as Le Petit Robert tells us, ‘having the moral characteristics often attributed to men: active, energetic, courageous etc’. In the chapter on ‘The Lesbian’, Beauvoir is constantly made to speak of ‘virile’ and ‘viriloid’ women, when she means women who are ...”

“... so ‘hysterically discreet’ that he got married by proxy; who, in the words of the writer Robert Neumann, ‘spent his life on the run. From the Great War to Switzerland. From the symbolic firing-squad across the Channel. From Blitzed London to the safety of provincial Bath. From Hitler’s threatened invasion of England to the USA. From Roosevelt’s ...”

“... myself I’m Gay Talese again.’ ‘The ones who come and go’, in James’s telling, include a young woman called Nina Burgess, who’s had a one night stand with Marley; Barry Diflorio, a CIA man; and Alex. The rest are gangsters, and the bigger picture they open up is a view from the ground of the working relationship between organised crime and Jamaican ...”

“... government of the day. The OBR was set up to correct that tendency. To run it, Osborne brought in Robert Chote, who had been head of the Institute for Fiscal Studies, a highly respected think tank which analyses government tax and spending plans and reports on them in a spirit of Cassandra-meets-Scrooge. In June 2010, the OBR predicted that the UK economy ...”

“... him through France, en route to yellow jersey and victor’s laurels: the vehicle carrying young James Murdoch, his Team Sky paymaster. The other stroke of luck with the gold medal was that David Cameron, with his reverse Midas touch, chose not to make the time-trial finish at Hampton Court one of his photo opportunities. While Cameron, with his ...”

“... personal contact, funding anti-malaria clinics and launching a programme to bring idealistic young volunteers to teach Chinese or help farmers. Nearly 18,000 Africans have received scholarships to study in China, the Chinese government has started to support Chinese-language studies in Africa, and Beijing has run an ‘Understanding China’ symposium ...”