“... Republic with its cynical and fluctuating anti-Americanism didn’t have long to run in fact, but George Marchais and Jacques Duclos and the others weren’t to know that, any more than they did when they became the ‘party of order’ once more and supported the ‘normalisation’ of Czechoslovakia a few months later. Somewhere between those two ...”

“... that there are now ‘eating dogs for the anorexic’. In the background, of course, lay the fluff-ball Jacobinism of September 1997 which surfaced in the media after Diana’s tryst with the underpass. It was rightly observed that the blood Royals inhabited an emotional tundra, where feeling was subjugated to ‘duty’ and ‘the Firm’. By contrast, Diana ...”

“... The Royal Ballet production brings out the witty nature of the piece: a man chases a tennis-ball into a garden and gets drawn into a lusty, tangled dance with two women. It was the first ballet ever danced in modern dress. The Royal Ballet’s performers play the whole thing intelligently: they follow the spirit of Nijinsky’s Modernism without turning ...”

“... of a century ago, everyone from Jean Baudrillard to Umberto Eco scanned it as a sort of crystal ball in which the future could be seen; the New York Times routinely portrays it not as Bosch’s Garden of Earthly Delights, but as his Ship of Fools (Schwarzenegger’s election as governor has deeply gratified the rest of the nation, which can now reflect even ...”

“... Jean de Dieu, 11, was curled up, a ball of flesh and blood, the look in his eyes was a glance from nowhere … without vision; Marie-Ange, aged nine, was propped up against a tree trunk … her legs apart, and she was covered in excrement, sperm and blood … in her mouth was a penis, cut with a machete, that of her father … nearby in a ditch with stinking water were four bodies, cut up, piled up, their parents and older brothers ...”

“... account. By the end of the 1964-70 Wilson Administration, everyone knew that Callaghan, Jenkins, George Brown, Healey, Castle, Crosland, Shore, Benn, Stewart and Crossman were political heavyweights – while the only real heavyweight now besides Blair is Gordon Brown. Parliament’s weakness is best gauged by the way the number of MPs keeps creeping up ...”

“... In his​ 1917 guide to diplomatic practice, Ernest Satow described a court ball held in London in 1768 at which a dispute over seating placements in the diplomatic box resulted in a duel between the Russian and French ambassadors. (The Russian ambassador came off worse, but survived.) The life of a diplomat is no longer assumed to feature the smell of flintlock at dawn, but it is still associated with a certain glamour ...”

“... about Kubrick’s own work with actors. There are magnificent performances in his movies – by George C. Scott, James Mason, Peter Sellers, George Macready, Kirk Douglas, Nicole Kidman, Sterling Hayden; and in smaller roles, Slim Pickens, Peter Ustinov, Sue Lyon, Leonard Rossiter, Shelley Winters, Sydney Pollack – but ...”

“... to ten by timing the sunset each night, the sand in the air making the sun a scumbled, smouldering ball, dropping fast and heavily, as if overcome by its own heat. My father had gone ahead of us and been to the Mouski to buy Persian and Turkish rugs, mirrors with gilded and curly frames; brass trays engraved with paisley butis and edged in scallops; a brass ...”

“... and appraising the fate of the New Liberalism, as it unfolded in the era of Asquith and Lloyd George, had served to open their minds to the historic frailty as well as the inherent strength of Labour’s position. In looking at the displacement of the Liberal Party by Labour, one cannot help but be aware of the long-term shifts in the British social ...”

“... of course, but in this case the dating was pretty precise. It was ten years since John, Paul, George and Ringo had recorded their first session together at the Akustik, a small studio in Hamburg (apparently a single 78 rpm copy of ‘Summertime’ still survives); and Lennon’s declaration that ‘the dream is over’ in ‘God’, track ten on John ...”

“... and social critics after Mill attempted to extend this analysis. The American reformer Henry George famously proposed a tax on land values as a panacea for social ills, arguing that all increases in the price of this natural monopoly were forms of ‘unearned increments’. In the later 19th century, the Fabians, Sidney Webb to the fore, extended the ...”

“... and left it at that, but he didn’t. It was in this wilderness of weeds and wildflowers that Mr George H. Hunter, whose mother had been born a slave, wished to place his grave. Mitchell’s interest​ in cemeteries was another relic of childhood that he brought with him to the writer’s life in New York City. He was kin by blood or marriage to people ...”

“... period, the 1967 edition Podhoretz is ‘in with the in-crowd’ (Jackie Kennedy, Lillian Hellman, George Plimpton); he goes where the in-crowd goes, knows what the in-crowd knows. Podhoretz was even invited to Truman Capote’s Black and White Ball of 1966, the party of the century. There could have been no greater ...”

“... Time In’) In his 1996 Everyman selection, George Walter calls this squaddie quality of absorption in the ordinary ‘his fascination with people – his democracy’. But it is not always present: it seems to come and go like a mind moving in and out of focus across all his postwar poetry-writing from ...”