“... Reagan and nominate plain-spoken originalists like Antonin Scalia and Robert Bork. Instead, he took the path described in my previous essay,* and tendered stealth nominees whose public records provided few clues as to future performance. Not that this administration was equally in the dark. During the 1980s, both ...”

“... their movies in parking lots or off of trucks until they are chased away by the police. The critic John Anderson who has written a book about Sundance calls it ‘a progressive event that recognises the right of every American to get her or his movie on-screen.’ And yet, as Andy Klein, another journalist, complains, Sundance is ‘about as useful’ for ...”

“... Edgar Hoover, Castro, Khrushchev, Howard Hunt, Earl Warren, George H.W. Bush, Duong Van Minh, the John Birch Society, the Freemasons or Aristotle Onassis. ‘I am not a conspiracy theorist,’ he begins. ‘I am a conspiracy empiricist.’ He wants to know the truth because without it ‘another president could once more be cut down in his or her ...”

“... I face More of the epic would be discovered under the sand as time went on. In 1990 Stephanie Dalley added more lines to her edition from newly recovered pieces, but most of what’s left has probably been smashed in the course of the Iraq wars. It seems proper that a place of fire and dust, its skin scarred by warfare, should be the origin of the story of the Flood today: devastation in negative, flood and drought bound together ...”

“... But most simply disappeared from my life, as if they meant no more to me than the person who took my toll on the Bay Bridge. Mike Rogin was among those who disappeared. Having burned my bridges, I had no occasion or desire to return to my old haunts, and our paths never crossed professionally. So though we had once been friends, good friends, years ...”

“... Bronx. O’Brien is one of a long line of hicks from upstate who made their way to the big city. John Ashbery, whose work O’Brien disapproved of (‘the poetry of programmatic inconsequence’), had arrived in NYC 15 years earlier, from a farm near Lake Ontario. Many of O’Brien’s poems could be characterised as pastoral. This is ‘East Branch’: a ...”

“... chic (the ready-dressed blue and silver faux-fir). For the unsure, there are ‘treetorials’ at John Lewis or ‘Christmas design consultation’ for £250. They’ll even decorate your tree for you. Most companies are cleverer with their own displays now, and recognise the opportunity for spectacle. You don’t even need the tree – just a surprising ...”

“... chronicles the work done by three investigative reporters, Stuart Prebble of World in Action, and John Osmond and David Williams of Harlech Television. Along with a police reconstruction on the BBC’s Crime-watch, they have ensured that literally millions of people are familiar with the basic circumstances of the crime. There was a moment when every amateur ...”

“... last month, has him playing an American Secret Service man haunted by his failure to protect John Kennedy on the day everyone remembers. Now another assassin, John Malkovich no less, is stalking another President: a risk for the incumbent but a chance of redemption for our hero. The regrets on the subject of violence ...”

“... slab into which is carved a replica of the covenant signed by the 25 male settlers on the St John, which was carrying them to what they thought of as a ‘new world’. In stark contrast, a recent initiative by volunteers to memorialise what is known about the historical presence of enslaved people in the town has resulted in the installation of ...”

“... on a ‘humanitarian’ mission that seemed to evaporate as Rwandese and Zairean rebel troops took it on themselves to settle the political and military legacy of the 1994 catastrophe. The details of that catastrophe were already familiar before the turmoil in Zaire and the Hutu migration back to Rwanda. The response of the international community at the ...”

“... proprietary rights over territories ‘lost’ by incompetent Presidents or neglectful officials. John Stempel’s book Inside the Iranian Revolution exemplifies this attitude. As Deputy Chief of the Political Section of the US Embassy, Stempel served in Tehran during the critical years from 1975 to mid-1979, after the fall of the Shah, when most of the ...”

“... a logger. They began immediately to have children (there would be seven in all). In 1942 Anscombe took up a research position at Cambridge, where she would encounter Wittgenstein – a turning point in her life. Over the next few years she went back and forth between Cambridge and Oxford; Geach stayed in Cambridge with the children, having found no steady ...”

“... whom they forgive.It wasn’t that he was particularly good-looking – according to his friend John Lehmann he was ‘a great, untidy, sprawling figure of a young man’. Virginia Woolf blamed his lack of looks on his father’s family: ‘He had a strong element of the Bell in him. What do I mean? I think I mean that he was practical & caustic & shrewd ...”

“... More particularly, he was the disciple who questioned the truth of Jesus’s resurrection. In John 20, the only gospel source for the story, he demands to see and touch the physical evidence of crucifixion – ‘Except I shall see in his hands the print of the nails, and put my finger into the print of the nails, and thrust my hand into his side, I will ...”