“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... be shot in the leg. At the time of the Black Lives Matter protests relating to the murder of George Floyd, he tweeted: ‘when the looting starts, the shooting starts.’ In July 2017, he advised police officers not to be ‘too nice’ when handling suspects. He praised someone for body-slamming a reporter and encouraged supporters at a rally before the ...”

“... 1992. They all hoped for the election of Clinton, because it got rid of the hated ‘moderate’ George Bush and also gave them the ideal Democrat against whom to ‘define’ themselves.) After his triumph last November, I got hold of Gingrich’s doctoral thesis from Tulane University. It was about education policy in the Belgian Congo. Not very well ...”

“... for which he had a passion. He loved in particular the work of the New York City Ballet under George Balanchine who in 1974 he considered ‘the great genius in the arts today’. Balanchine was as laconic as Gorey, who liked quoting the choreographer’s frequent advice in rehearsal, ‘Better don’t do.’ A sketch from the ‘Scènes de ...”

“... on what sound like fairly reasonable grounds. While decrying Picasso’s ‘duchess period’, his ball-going and fancy costumes, Braque was, in his soberer way, a pretty dressy fellow himself: on his rare trips to London, he headed not for the National Gallery but for the house of Mr Lobb the bootmaker. He had a taste for fast and expensive cars, both driving ...”

“... Immortal Cells of Henrietta Lacks’, is illustrated with a photograph of a cell. It looks like a ball of maggots. Is this her? No. It is a duly credited picture of a ‘cultured rat bone marrow cell’, magnified 19,500 times. According to the anonymous author, the HeLa line was begun when cells were taken from the cervix of a 31-year-old Baltimore ...”

“... slaughter the marauding Pindari armies of Chitu, although he does not quote the remark of Colonel George Fitzclarence, an aide-de-camp to the Governor of Bengal, who underlined their real purpose. The Pindaris were ‘viewed as public robbers’, Fitzclarence wrote, and so ‘their extirpation was aimed at, and not their defeat as an enemy entitled to the ...”