“... had left him a bit short of obvious villains and hate-figures – until, incredibly, he settled on Nelson Mandela’) and even more tremendous jokes. Amis is a much-envied man, but this relationship really is worth envying:My father and I often had occasion to agree that ‘fuck off’ was very funny. One naturally admired its brutality and brevity – but it ...”

“... Christian Legal Society, as the first chief of the department’s faith-based office. He named Eric Treene, former litigation director at the Becket Fund for Religious Liberty, as special counsel for religious discrimination, a new position in the Justice Department.4 The most striking thing about the Republican convention was Bush’s refusal to allow it ...”

“... with Edward’s conclusion. The rift was over. In 1986 we met in New York. Christopher Hill, Eric Hobsbawm, he and I had been brigaded to discuss agendas for radical history at the New School. In the overflowing auditorium, hanging on his words, he was die image of a romantic orator: his bursts of passionate speech punctuated by that typical gesture, a ...”

“... distant horizon, and I heard it pass from lip to lip that Colas was back again. When his rival, Eric Tabarly, signed his book in the Librairie Maritime, so many people turned up that the police had to keep order in the street. A distinguished political scientist, questioned about the future of France after de Gaulle, replied that his greatest anxiety was ...”

“... the question of the copyright to Clare’s manuscripts, which is claimed by his Oxford editor, Eric Robinson, who bought them for £1 in 1965. Bate’s account of Clare’s relationship with Taylor convincingly shows that Clare often needed the stimulus of his publisher’s urgings: ‘If I cannot hear from John Taylor now and then I cannot ...”

“... troops left the vanquished but still defiant South, scarcely a decade after the end of the war. Eric Foner has described the Reconstruction era, when ex-slaves became citizens and the first biracial Southern governments were elected to power, as America’s ‘unfinished revolution’. The battle over Reconstruction never ended; it has simply changed ...”

“... which embodied racial violence deeply and explicitly in its laws, semiology and institutions. As Nelson Mandela explained in Pretoria in 1964, in his statement from the dock, it had taken the ANC almost half a century, from its founding in 1912 to the Sharpeville massacre in 1960, to accept that its non-violent methods weren’t getting results; that if the ...”

“... so as to watch out for him in a forthcoming Honours List. As it is we can only be grateful that Nelson Mandela wasn’t imprisoned in England or he would have been bankrupted on his release. 12 August. While it ought to be a pleasant place to shop, Marylebone High Street is spoiled by the people who shop there, who are often pushy and heedless so ...”

“... no football matters more to the world than the World Cup. In 1966 the Brazilian playwright Nelson Rodrigues wrote that ‘everywhere has its irremediable national catastrophe, something like a Hiroshima. Our catastrophe, our Hiroshima, was the defeat to Uruguay in 1950.’ Brazil lost that de facto final before a home crowd of officially 173,850 but ...”