“... In May 1983 he was promoted to assistant to the chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, General John Vessey, and over the next couple of years he oversaw a secret team – operating in part out of the office of Daniel Murphy, Bush’s chief of staff – which quietly conducted at least 35 covert operations against drug trafficking, terrorism and, most ...”

“... the party’s co-operation agreement with the Scottish Greens. Yousaf and his replacement, John Swinney, sullied their reputations by defending the former health secretary Michael Matheson, who misled Holyrood’s presiding officer over £11,000 of roaming charges racked up on his iPad. The SNP’s centralising tendencies, lack of transparency and ...”

“... than anyone else alive. Elsewhere her touch is not as sure as it might be. Describing Sir Robert Kerr (anglicised to Carr), James I’s favourite, who obtained Ralegh’s estate, as ‘a penniless Scotsman from Roxburghshire’ does not tell us a great deal and it misses the irony that Kerr was no more and no less than the ...”

“... was widely mourned. ‘His tireless work to deliver safe consumption rooms,’ the first minister, John Swinney, said, ‘leaves an important legacy which will be remembered.’ By the time the Thistle opened this year, the tide seemed to be changing in many countries, with abstinence-based schemes on the rise and SDCFs branded as ‘state-sponsored ...”

“... its massive steel doors wide open and its landing ramp fully extended beyond the bow. Major Bill Kerr, commander of 265 Battery and my father’s friend, stood on the lip of the ramp. When he felt the ship’s stern shudder as it scraped the bottom, he stepped forward into what he thought would be ankle-deep water but turned out to come up to his chin, with ...”

“... science at the Catholic University, and became engaged to the playwright and theatre critic Walter Kerr. He broke her heart. (Years later William Shawn told a colleague that Kerr would never write for the New Yorker ‘because of Maeve’.) In 1941, Brennan moved to Manhattan and soon found work at Harper’s Bazaar, where ...”

“... it conveys is that to him that hath, it shall be given: not only Hintlesham Hall to live in, but John Cleese and Joanna Lumley for company, and a useful collection of cashmere sweaters to wear on the HTV series which spawned the book. We further learn that HTV’s ‘imaginative and courageous’ Patrick Dromgoole (a good director of avant-garde plays as an ...”

“... us, he was operating in what was probably his fifth language. He soon came to the notice of Philip Kerr, Lloyd George’s private secretary, and subsequently to that of the prime minister himself. Pointed questions were asked in Parliament about his anti-Polish sentiments, and a poisonous piece in G.K. Chesterton’s weekly magazine New Witness outed the ...”

“... was convened in Austin, Texas, undoubtedly at the initiative of Professor Wm Roger Louis, whose Kerr Chair of English History and Culture at the University of Texas was one of the two principal sponsors (along with the Lyndon Baines Johnson Library), although the president and staff of the hyper-rich Pennzoil Company and sundry U of T outfits are also ...”

“... In twenty years,’ Lady Astor used to say of Philip Kerr, Lord Lothian, ‘I’ve never known Philip to be wrong on foreign politics.’ Though Lothian himself thought much the same, it is, in fact, harder to think of an occasion when he was right. As Sir Robert Vansittart, the strongly anti-Nazi head of the Foreign Office in the 1930s put it, ‘Lothian was an incurably superficial Johnny-Know-All ...”

“... of repression in which men like Elliott Abrams (now Deputy NSA and special assistant to Bush) and John Negroponte (now National Intelligence director) connived during the 1980s in Central America. The brazen persecution of Sahrawis is once again common, after a three-year interval of relative calm, following Hassan II’s death. In 2001, Mohamed Daddach, a ...”

“... slow, act fast,’ he said. Books about him generally reverse that equation. Walter Kerr’s The Silent Clowns (1975) tried to match Keaton’s torrential invention with his own prolix showboating; Rudi Blesh’s Keaton (1966) had the imprimatur of the master as well as his collaboration but no equivalent grace. Both Blesh’s biography and Tom ...”

“... for the labours of its president, Giscard d’Estaing, assisted by a British factotum, John Kerr, the two real authors of the draft, their presence was of no consequence. The future charter of Europe was written for the establishments of the West, the governments of the existing 15 member states who had to approve it, relegating the countries ...”

“... from China; this fashion, led by such as C.S. Lewis and practised by such as Fr Martin Jarrett-Kerr, seemed interesting to others, who may thus have seemed, willy-nilly, to be crypto-Christians. One point of importance in this, as usual good, but as usual digressive, essay concerns Empson’s refusal to distinguish between the truth of poetry and the truth ...”

“... at any kind of obscure urban address, such as 24 Whitfield Road, Haslemere.’ The writer Judith Kerr, who had fled the Nazis with her family and ended up boarding at Hayes Court, was asked by two girls: ‘Did your nanny have a Cockney accent? Because we’ve all been discussing it and we’ve decided your vowels aren’t pure.’ Amanda Theunissen, who was ...”