“... to live with her brother, Leo. Like Barney, she already knew she was gay: an early romance with May Bookstaver, ‘upright and a trifle brutal’, had convinced her of that. In France Stein began work on QED, a novel about Bookstaver, and she and Leo started buying up paintings – Cézanne, Renoir, Picasso, Matisse. ‘Cézanne gave me a new feeling about ...”

“... In​ August and September 1990, Richard Sale, a lieutenant colonel from the Light Infantry regiment of the British army, toured the UK and West Germany – then just months away from reunification – with a primitive Zenith Supersport laptop. Sale had commanded a company, some 120 men, in Northern Ireland in the early 1980s and later a battalion of 650 ...”

“... Holland. In fact, one of the most notorious London auctions of the 1830s was devoted to them. On 7 May 1835, Samuel Sotheby began his sale of what he described as ‘many original and unpublished manuscripts, and printed books with MS annotations, by Philipp Melancthon [sic]’, an erudite Renaissance Hellenist, more eirenic and less bold than his close friend ...”

“... campaign until, just a week before the debate in New York, it ended with the election of Richard Nixon. Friedman had been closely involved with Barry Goldwater’s reactionary, anti-desegregationist campaign in 1964, and was now an adviser to Nixon; the New York Times called him a ‘radical conservative’. He was also the foremost advocate of ...”

“... could be the difference between being a statistic in a Channel 4 filler and being reincarnated by Richard Burton. Only losers leave their stories to the East London Advertiser and the more literate class of probation officer. Take that McVicar. He was totally out of order. An armed robber, ‘one of the top men of his profession’ (Lambrianou), he blew all ...”

“... stepping into the fray as Docs’ Joshua, sums up the feeling best when he says here: ‘Hunter may be the reincarnation of Lono – the God returned after 1500 years of wandering like a lovesick child to save his people – and his beloved American Constitution ... He is your saviour and he is guardian of all you profess to hold dear. In his weirdness he ...”

“... Kennan’s modest agenda for thawing relations with Belgrade. Kennan left government for good in May 1963. Yugoslavia’s estrangement from Moscow, unrest in Poland, rebellion in Hungary, Khrushchev’s destalinisation campaign and the Sino-Soviet split made it apparent that the notion of a monolithic communist threat was no longer justified by the ...”

“... dictates of politicians and to the delusions of popular culture? No one could be sure. In 1964, Richard Hofstadter brilliantly described the ‘paranoid style’ of American politics: your opponents weren’t simply wrong, they were conspiring against you, mobilising dark forces to suppress free and rational thought. The joining up of psychiatry and history ...”

“... In​ May 1987, as part of the festivities marking the 200th anniversary of the United States constitution, Thurgood Marshall, the first African American to sit on the US Supreme Court, delivered a hugely controversial speech. Noting the quasi-religious reverence in which the framers of the constitution are held in America, Marshall expressed some scepticism about routine proclamations of their ‘wisdom, foresight and sense of justice ...”

“... brother James had been on Captain Cook’s second voyage). There is Joshua Reynolds and Richard Sheridan, and later Madame de Staël and Talleyrand. In her ostensibly private records of her life, Burney often keeps pace with current events and personalities, providing the biographer with the background as well as the foreground of a Life. It is as ...”

“... to which foids consign men they don’t take seriously. ‘The ideology of the manosphere may be particularly attractive to white, heterosexual men because it appeals to and reinforces their sense of aggrieved entitlement,’ Kennedy-Kollar writes. ‘Their dissatisfaction and anger stem, ultimately, from the feeling that they are being denied ...”

“... of the non-combatant Lawrence to complain while thousands of his compatriots fell in France. But Richard Aldington felt that Lawrence never recovered from the banning of The Rainbow, and Kinkead-Weekes follows him by placing this event at the centre of his narrative. The judge ruled that there was ‘no justification whatever for the perpetration of such a ...”

“... ideals of the Republic. Goldgar rightly argues that the historian reconstructing an organisation may find its malfunctions more informative, in crucial respects, than its blueprints. But Goldgar also argues that many debates proved impossible to resolve. Even within the world Of the Huguenots, disagreement raged – for example, on whether local churches had ...”

“... into a more critical perspective on the war. Eventually even the cautious Times came around and in May 1972 put Hersh on their payroll. This was the beginning of a pattern that would be repeated over several decades: powerful editors – first Rosenthal, later David Remnick of the New Yorker – supported Hersh, for a time, even while they did not always share ...”

“... the ‘inheritance of power’ that occurred with Bashar al-Assad’s succession in 2000. But Richard Cromwell seriously tried to liberalise the Protectorate; the army felt threatened and deposed him after nine months. Assad fell ill in 1983 and it seemed for a moment that his younger brother, Rifat, would take over, in what would have been an ...”