“... blew up as they were fishing at Cuan à Bhòcan, the Sea of the Ghosts, south of Barra Head, on May Day 1897. Highland folk know very well that many of their forebears left their homelands by choice. So why had Chrissie said that her forebear Mary Ann MacNeill (née MacCormick) was ‘cleared’? Those last islands had been drawing me for most of my ...”

“... attorney general, talked about running for governor in 2016. He died on the evening of 30 May 2015. His last words were ‘beautiful, beautiful’, which is at least as plausible as Steve Jobs’s last word being ‘Wow!’ At the funeral Obama delivered a speech, Chris Martin of Coldplay sang ‘Til Kingdom Come’, and Beau and Hunter’s ...”

“... a tree in bloom and birds screeching outside the window of my boardinghouse on the Aventino in May; in another part of Rome, a boardinghouse with a dark, frozen corridor like the hallway in my childhood home.Seeing her lover from a certain angle suddenly takes her back, only now with the thought that the dining-room table, ‘instead of being a thing of ...”

“... do. The myth persists that decolonisation after 1945 was a dignified, planned process. Its advance may have been jostled by the impatience of half-educated agitators, but the empire’s intention had always been to lead all its territories and races towards ‘responsible self-government’ and – conceivably – to independence.Such nonsense! It’s still ...”

“... could approach by manipulating or kneading the reality and the living men who comprised it. Djilas may have recognised bits of himself in Stalin: in particular, the ‘final ideals’ behind the restless realism. ‘Because the true fanatical fervour was so clearly recognisable behind his cynicism,’ a Swiss journalist wrote years later, at the height of ...”

“... certainly isn’t the kind of remark Oedipus was ever allowed to make: previous tragic characters may have spoken of funerals, but they didn’t mention the cost of the catering or implicitly liken their remarried mothers to a meat dish inappropriately served twice. In Ivano-Frankivsk, as elsewhere when this play is done well, Hamlet’s line achieved a ...”

“... hydrangea); and his need for his unconscious to have its way involves an ambivalence about what it may bring home (the dreams about his dog – restitution, or nightmare?). Ammons was raised in a house that had hardly any books. All he could remember reading were the first 11 pages of Robinson Crusoe – the rest of the book had disappeared. That memory is ...”

“... the killing of millions of ‘natives’, and of course slavery. Belgian rule in the Congo may have come to an end in 1960 but that doesn’t mean the effects of Belgian rule have also ended; and Belgian historians have only just begun to take account of what the country did in Africa. There seems to be no end to the aftermath of empire in the lives of ...”

“... diplomat, who had also been a personal assistant to Hammarskjöld, ran into an old acquaintance, Robert Ahier, at the Paris Opéra. Ahier was a journalist and now held a senior position with United Press International. In the course of their conversation, Ahier told Kemoularia that he had a tenuous lead on the fate of the Albertina. He had come across ...”

“... Lacks. Click. The American Congressional Record. In Memory of Henrietta Lacks – Hon. Robert L. Ehrlich, Jr (Extension of Remarks – 4 June 1997) Henrietta Lacks was born in 1920 in Clover, Virginia. At the age of 23 she moved to Turner’s Station, near Baltimore, Maryland, joining her husband David. She had five children, four of whom ...”

“... has helped the Progress Party to become a major political force. Its share of the vote may have dropped from 22.9 per cent to 16.3 in the 2013 parliamentary elections, but it was able to enter the governing coalition for the first time. When it was established in 1973, the PP was known as the ALP: Anders Lange’s Party for a Strong Reduction in ...”

“... to Montagu, this was no cause for alarm: the cost and ratio of raw footage to edited film for Robert Flaherty’s Man of Aran were similar. Because the film had to be sent back to Hollywood for processing, Eisenstein never had access to rushes; so he filmed more takes than he would have needed, just in case. Never having made a film before, the Sinclairs ...”

“... position occupied by no other city in a European society of comparable size. Madrid, Rome, Berlin may be capitals, but to their rank as seats of government corresponds no such predominance in culture, where Barcelona, Milan, Frankfurt can in different ways rival or outdo them. London is flanked by seats of learning whose prestige has long surpassed its ...”

“... of Moorehead’s book reads like a long epilogue, though some readers – women especially – may find it the more affecting. Gellhorn never gave up. She drove herself into brick walls searching for a balance between love and independence, society and solitude, outwardness and inwardness, and was beset by a profoundly American indecision between the road ...”

“... case, a technical prerequisite. You need an A-bomb to ignite an H-bomb, and the lab’s Director Robert Oppenheimer reasonably enough felt that the race to forestall the Nazis required no distractions from the main lines of development. Destructive friction between fusion and fission was reduced by giving Teller what was essentially a roaming brief, and it ...”