“... around the Frida Bus speaks like a young lawyer. ‘Well, he is a sort of a phoney, isn’t he?’ Richard Nixon said of the young Vietnam veteran John Kerry in 1971, when Kerry was proving effective in turning opinion against the war. There was later a question about whether, among other things, the Watergate burglars had gone looking for material on ...”

“... The first​ big leader to livestream a message to the virtual World Health Assembly on 18 May was supposed to be Cyril Ramaphosa, president of South Africa and chairman of the African Union, but something went wrong with the feed. Xi Jinping went first instead. We saw the president of China seated behind a highly polished table, in front of a mural showing rosy dawn creeping over the Great Wall ...”

“... shared. But the occasion did provide one perfect vignette of the Thatcher era:The bishops included Richard Harries, the new bishop of Oxford, at that time a frequent broadcaster on Radio 4’s ‘Thought for the Day’, to which Mrs Thatcher usually listened. As he recalled, ‘Mrs Thatcher welcomed us very graciously for drinks before lunch. “Ah,” she ...”

“... end of the sentence. According to Johnson, he was a remarkable instance of ‘how far impudence may carry ignorance’. Taylor himself – my John Taylor – later became oculist to George III, a job he shared with his brother. The post was unpaid and undemanding: though Taylor seems to have been a competent ophthalmologist in his twenties, by the time he ...”

“... got it right when he said in a 1998 interview that Roots is a ‘work of the imagination’. This may be the reason it captured the imagination of millions and why genealogical work began a new phase of expansion. New organisations were founded, such as the Afro-American Historical and Genealogical Society in May 1977 and ...”

“... been put on them to stall the damage done by not having used steroids with the radiotherapy. They may slow down the infections, but have hideous side-effects; within three weeks of taking a ‘very moderate dose, of the weakest steroid they make’, my weight had shot from eight stone to eleven stone. Fat that feels as if my body has been stuffed with some ...”

“... has given the world three gifts: chemicals, debt and Joe Biden. Each promises great things but may deliver undesirable side effects. Until the 19th century Delaware’s primary crop was tobacco. Then a French Huguenot called Éleuthère Irénée du Pont, son of an adviser to Louis XVI, began manufacturing gunpowder on the Brandywine River, north of ...”

“... coverage of Franco’s speech in Burgos, for instance, is ‘nauseating’.) That a candidate may have committed bloodshed or pillage has never posed much of a problem in the annals of canonisation. Berend doesn’t demonstrate that it was an issue for medieval ecclesiasts to receive huge booty from someone who killed large numbers of people, or was too ...”

“... assumed to be shallowness or pretence, is probably what puts people off, although a simpler reason may be that Tarantino’s characters swear all the time – there are even more motherfuckers here than in Miles Davis’s autobiography – and are more or less impossible to understand. Tarantino has come to be seen as a kind of Post-Modern primitive, neither ...”

“... the mid to late Seventies, to Derridean anxieties about the metaphysical haunting of texts. Which may simply be to say that several of these poets have been around for a while, and that they’ve been interested in radical or oppositional modes. Often notions of purity and incantation (the poet-shaman, again) get the edge over the numbing mix of ...”

“... a sort of indignation disorder.) New in this text is the priority given to man as artist; Adam may have fallen, but actually he ‘sought the creative life’. For Newman ‘the aesthetic act always precedes the social one’; ‘man’s first expression’ was ‘a poetic outcry rather than a demand for communication’. Once more an American version of ...”

“... pilot, Lieutenant Van Dyke Fernald, who was shot down at Godega, near Conegliano, in July 1918. He may have accidentally broken formation – often a fatal mistake – but his fellow officers believed he had hung back deliberately at the end of a patrol in order to engage the enemy. His plane was either hit by anti-aircraft fire or attacked in the air – a ...”

“... on ‘The Victorian Values of Dr Tripe’, you’d better carry a chequebook. Shoreditch Town Hall may well be the last place where such an anachronistic object serves any useful purpose, in these days of obligatory standing orders, cashback supermarkets with low-level barter and traded promissory notes for those outside the credit system. What goes on ...”

“... Sartre – for or against? Raymond Aron – for or against? … Should we take a blowtorch to May 1968 and its ideas … seen now as incomprehensible, elitist, dangerous and anti-democratic? Have the protagonists of that revolution … all become little bourgeois capitalist pleasure seekers without faith or principles, or haven’t they? … The father ...”

“... requirement in doubt. Mount’s account of the framework of the United Kingdom, and what repair it may call for, has already beguiled readers across the political spectrum. Commentators on right and left alike have praised its wit and acumen. If few have seen eye to eye with every proposal it makes, virtually all have agreed that this is the work of an ...”