“... 2018, Trump apparently asked aides why the US couldn’t just invade. But until last month, the White House’s preferred scenario was for the Venezuelan army to get rid of Maduro on its behalf. In February 2018 the then secretary of state, Rex Tillerson, casually speculated about the possibility of a military coup, and in September the New York Times ...”

“... a different social configuration. There are many outstanding gay writers – Dominique Fernandez, Tony Duvert, Renaud Camus, as well as several who have died in the last decade, such as Hervé Guibert, Guy Hocquenghem and Gilles Barbedette – but I’m sure none of these writers except possibly the militant Fernandez would accept the label ‘gay ...”

“... buildings were erected, made of stone instead of wood and characteristically painted yellow with white plaster flourishes, in the belief that they would bring with them urban sophistication. But Moscow’s overall character remained that of a ‘big village’ (a phrase Muscovites still use), with low, dimly lit buildings straggling along narrow lanes ...”

“... Finn black? Of course he wasn’t. By today’s accredited categories he was poor, male, white trash. So what – besides a desire to be arresting – lies behind Professor Fishkin’s clearly tendentious title? Mark Twain, Clifton Fadiman wrote, is ‘our Chaucer, our Homer, our Dante, our Virgil, because Huckleberry Finn is the nearest thing we ...”

“... to review An Accidental MP, Martin Bell’s account of how he ended up wearing nothing but white suits. And now they’ve got Honor Fraser, a supermodel, to write about Nicholas Blincoe’s latest novel, White Mice (Sceptre, £10.99), because it’s set in the world of fashion. The thinking behind the title is ...”

“... Tony Crosland’s epoch-making book The Future of Socialism was published in 1956. That Roy Hattersley’s aim is to don the master’s mantle in the late 1980s is evident not only from his book’s subtitle, but also from his brief account of a conversation he had with Tony Crosland a week before the latter’s fatal stroke ...”

“... pool’; ‘You cannot guess the weed I hold,/Clara Green, Acapulco Gold.’ (In a letter to Tony Tanner from May 1968, he wrote: ‘I have a lot of the best ever grass – it is known as Acapulco Gold and is $15 a lid, it is that good.’) He was always interested in the body and the bodiless, or of the body transforming, being taken over by another ...”

“... columns line the approach to a building with curving, unadorned balconies projecting from a simple white block. There is an elegiac quality to many of Pare’s photographs, which often depict sites that have long since lost their original function: abandoned factories, clubs for workers whose jobs no longer exist. Even where the buildings remain in use, they ...”

“... took were clearly intended not only as provocations to Tbilisi, but as signals to Washington. The White House responded by pursuing the missile shield more intently: in early July, Condoleezza Rice travelled to Prague to sign a deal on radar facilities. On 9 and 10 July, according to the State Department’s press office, she was in the Georgian capital to ...”

“... the temptation to preach ‘The End of the World is Nigh’ when they see the shit on the beach or white dishes scanning the sky, and the johnnies jostling for searoom like the eelskins of very sick eels Prochorus would see as new signs of doom and the angels half-way through the seals. My charms are mere whispers in lovers’ ears against the loud St ...”

“... that Ronnie Kray did shock him. Just once. An unforgettable occasion. A motor eased alongside Tony at the corner of Blythe Street, Bethnal Green. Ron and Reg were inside, keeping company with a known associate, Dickie Morgan. Reg was nicely cased in a blue three-piece by Woods of Kingsland Road. Dickie matched him. (The Twins were very influential that ...”

“... his homosexuality. An earlier cure by means of a French girl had not been completely successful; Tony’s father, Brooks Baekeland, had gone off with the girl he married after Barbara’s death. This occurred in Cadogan Square, so Tony was sent to Broadmoor. Eight years later he was released, extradited, and sent to live ...”

“... if more of those whom I saw eating and sunning themselves had been young and bronzed, not old and white-haired, and if the pavilion was not still surrounded by the brick terraces you see in the earliest photographs, you would have guessed that the planner’s dream had been achieved. Overy quotes Earl De La Warr, the socialist mayor of Bexhill who promoted ...”

“... had to take the place of law in a lawless world; the racial collisions which occurred as ruthless white men from a predominantly Protestant East poured into a territory which was still vestigially Spanish (Catholic)-Mexican-Indian-American; the sexual and emotional problems endemic in these growing aggregations of what were overwhelmingly – at least at ...”

“... as early as 1940: ‘What have you done to my high metaphysical valley?’ The days when the white peaks of Popocatépetl and Ixtaccíhuatl formed a constant backdrop to the city’s south-east are long gone. In fact, they are now so rarely seen that when they are visible residents may say: ‘The volcanoes came out’ – as if the mountains had ...”