“... to the stage but not too close, and felt ready to hear how threatening Ahmadinejad’s shadow was. More and more people crowded in and eventually filled every corner of the hall. Dore Gold was the first speaker. ‘John Negroponte,’ he began, ‘US director of national intelligence, said a week ago that in the Middle ...”

“... from 1920 to 1924 and again from 1932 to 1949 – and his most enthusiastic missionary. He did more than anyone to disseminate the tenets of psychoanalysis around the globe; founded the American and British Psychoanalytic Societies; and launched the International Journal of Psycho-Analysis. After Freud’s death in 1939, he effectively took charge of the ...”

“... reproductive rights being curtailed in many states, getting the amendment in the constitution was more important than ever, she told me. Most other liberal democracies had constitutional provisions of this sort, ‘even Japan’. She didn’t mention it, but it was the 104th anniversary of the day American women won the right to vote, with the ratification of ...”

“... The​ New Yale Book of Quotations gives you a snippet of more or less everything. There are lines from poets and pop stars and politicians and philosophers, as well as words ascribed to people with jobs that don’t begin with ‘p’, such as film stars and novelists and historians. It includes some proverbs, nursery rhymes, advertising slogans and a category called ‘sayings’, for example, ‘Kilroy was here’ (learnedly traced to the Kearns Air Force Post Review of 1945) and ‘get a life’ (which it’s hard to believe wasn’t used before the Washington Post of 23 January 1983 ...”

“... wielding a shotgun. Over time, as she divorced Tony Snowdon, took up with Roddy Llewellyn, drank more, smoked even more and put on weight, she became a figure of camp fun, a caricature that took on a life of its own after her death in 2002. Craig Brown’s Ma’am Darling: 99 Glimpses of Princess Margaret, a witty ...”

“... show several points of similarity with Smith’s: the two did not quarrel, but he was to have more to do with Cockburn’s friend Jeffrey, editor of the Review. Jeffrey’s cockiness and scepticism were chided and parodied: ‘Damn the solar system! bad light – planets too distant – pestered with comets – feeble contrivance; – could make a better ...”

“... threatened by sinister forces. ‘American Poetry’ is seen as the big, bad colonial influence by more than half the 35 contributors, few of whom bother to make it clear whether they mean Robert Lowell, or Allen Ginsberg, or the Black Mountain imitators of William Carlos Williams. ‘The Liverpool Poets’ are regarded with a mixture of fear and ...”

“... but judges have built their professional lives on resisting such amnesia, and Lord Hutton is more judge-like than most. ‘The circumstances surrounding the death of Dr David Kelly’ included ‘Mr Andrew Gilligan’s broadcasts on the BBC Today programme on 29 May 2003’ since these had ‘closely involved Dr Kelly’ because they had alleged ...”

“... entrepreneurs to fund the studio project, and one of them, Joel Rosenman, suggested it might make more sense to put money into a live event. Woodstock Ventures was duly constituted and the team set to work on a ‘music and arts fair’. But who would lease the land for a gathering of fifty or sixty thousand people? Lang had set his heart on a farm in ...”

“... It was all proper wood. Every drawer was stuffed with tablecloths and skirts she never wore. More than one of the drawers in her bedroom was kept for handkerchiefs. ‘There’s never anything in them magazines,’ she said, ‘except holidays. I like the holiday ones, with Spain and that. You can go to Spain now as if it was Scarborough. For the price ...”

“... months.Numerous friends and acquaintances testified to Barnes’s ‘complexity’. The painter Thomas Hart Benton, for instance, described him as ‘magnificent … friendly, kindly, hospitable’, but also ‘a ruthless, underhanded son of a bitch’. With Barnes, there was no middle ground, minuscule self-doubt and no remorse over those he ...”

“... to attend radical meetings. The most important moment in his development came when he encountered Thomas Spence in 1813, at the height of the popularity of Spencean thought. Spence, who was born in 1750 and witnessed the harsh effects of the Enclosure Acts – which turned common land into private property – was against landownership and landlords ...”

“... in Morse code by an international gang of drug traffickers.In​ 1860, seventeen years before Thomas Edison patented the phonograph, as a way of translating sounds into marks on waxed paper, a French cardiologist called Étienne-Jules Marey developed a portable sphygmograph, or ‘pulse-writer’, a device attached to the wrist which used a stylus to ...”

“... blue – but significantly unable to cope with Latin syntax or word-order, a matter which needs more thought. Failures of that kind have been going on for a long time, and have had an effect of cumulative collective amnesia. The author of the book under review pointed out not long ago in a piece in the THES that till recently you could go into most ...”

“... A ‘hereditary predisposition to suicide’ was believed to run in families, and even M. Carey Thomas, the progressive president of Bryn Mawr, ‘placed considerable emphasis on students’ family back-grounds and the mental characteristics inherited from their parents’. In June 1904, Kathy, now Kate, married Tom Hepburn, a classmate of her sister ...”