“... and workers is further explored through St Dominique’s relationship with Big Blonde, a broad-shouldered worker who looks like a ‘hero straight out of Joseph Conrad’. Big Blonde is something of an enigma around the Vieux Port: he spends his time working hard on the docks or courting Petit Frère, a sex worker ‘fascinating with his pale ...”

“... off the movement, and one would never guess at the Symphony’s painful parturition. It is a big, broad-shouldered piece, nearly fifty minutes long, which compels attention by scale alone. The Biblical cantata has a similar power. No one could sit, as I did earlier this year, in the Royal Festival Hall during a performance by the Philharmonia and London ...”

“... watched their tongues when he was around. The rest, if they thought about it, imagined ‘Richard’ probably had to sign some nasty piece of paper in order to get out of Poland: so bloody what? After reading Domosławski’s compelling, exhaustive and often upsetting book, their easy tolerance – like mine – begins to look different. In the first ...”

“... interests opposed to the changes never materialised. After all, as Hacker and Pierson point out, Richard Nixon, who might have been expected to share some of Reagan’s sympathies, had gone the other way in his actual policies a decade earlier, shoring up the legislative framework of the welfare state and maintaining a broadly progressive tax ...”

“... it mildly, since Scott Moncrieff’s triumphs of cadence were now and again interrupted by very broad errors. One at least still lingered for Carol Clark to correct in her version of The Prisoner. When sleeping, Albertine is said to shed ‘the various marks of humanity which had so disappointed me’, ‘ses différents caractères d’humanité qui ...”

“... has him mingling a few moments of scary, personal invention with lots of expansive coasting – broad, theatrical gestures towards the idea of a personality. But in the conversation he was working, and thinking. Coppola says, ‘The man is mad, Marlon, I mean his madness is our madness,’ to which Brando replies: I don’t think that he’s like Patton. I ...”

“... they are not participants in its troubles. Even President Hugo Chávez of Venezuela (about whom Richard Gott has recently written in the LRB) has done no more than strike an occasional ‘Bolivarian’ populist attitude. Few countries in the last two centuries have been as little involved as Colombia in international wars, which may be one of the reasons ...”

“... I suppose because the rasping quality in his voice echoed Auden’s harsh tones. However, because Richard Griffiths was available and indeed anxious to play the part, the role went to him. Emergency casting sessions such as the one Gambon knew we were holding are always mildly hysterical and often very funny as assorted names (often wildly unsuitable) are put ...”

“... to bring countries together than any number of EU directives.’ He quotes another political hero, Richard Cobden, the Manchester textile manufacturer and Anti-Corn Law Leaguer, who described free trade as ‘God’s diplomacy’, not bothering to notice that in the case of the redundant cotton weavers of Bengal, the casualties of cheap Lancashire cloth, God ...”

“... but the idyll is deceptive as once, at least, the river has seen slaughter. It was in 1388 that Richard II’s favourite, Robert Vere, led his army floundering along this flooded valley, desperate to escape his baronial pursuers, who eventually caught up and cut most of them down a little upstream at Radcot Bridge.15 February. R. and I go down to Leicester ...”

“... exporting of equipment, technologies of torture and bad lieutenants. To take one instance, Richard Zuley, a specialist at Guantánamo, had become reassuringly ruthless while working for a Chicago police unit that for decades interrogated predominantly African-Americans at so-called black sites. It’s only now, with a white supremacist ensconced in the ...”

“... of lynchers’, turned to it for inspiration, drawing on the work of Black writers such as Richard Wright and Chester Himes. America is a ‘battlefield’, Simone de Beauvoir wrote, ‘and you can only become passionate about the battle it is waging with itself, in which the stakes are beyond measure.’Since Beauvoir made this observation in 1947, at ...”

“... and affordably from Ghent to Aix and beyond. Periodicals popped up, designed to offer a broad readership summaries and criticisms of new literature. Origins and staffing methods varied. Some journals were organised and largely written by a single editor, like Pierre Bayle, others by a sort of cooperative – such as the group of young Huguenots in ...”

“... American history, Evans distinguishes it from the ‘quest for racial spoils’, the ‘quotas for broad groups of “minorities” ’ – the affirmative action which, he wrongly asserts, Martin Luther King Jr opposed. According to Evans, moreover, the ‘ill-judged 1965 Immigration Reform Act’ – it repealed the restrictive, ethnocentric national origins ...”