“... office on 3 September proved to be, in Hunt’s words, a ‘dry hole’. Some months later, on 3 May 1972, on the orders of Colson, the White House arranged to fly some Cuban-American veterans of the Bay of Pigs to Washington from Miami. They were told that Ellsberg (now released on bail) would be attending an anti-war rally on the steps of the Capitol and ...”

“... on cause and effect and the realities of state power – was a form Amis soon abandoned. It may not be a coincidence that he wrote it at a time when he and his friend Christopher Hitchens weren’t speaking, or so the papers said: Hitchens objected to a chapter in Koba the Dread that accused him of collusion with Stalinist crimes. Perhaps, with the ...”

“... Besides, I had already spent an excellent evening with this fascist general!’ He even stood up David Ben-Gurion, the founder of the state, while missing none of his appointments with Palestinian citizens of Israel. When Meir Ya’ari, the Mapam party leader, asked him about his remarks in Cairo on the right of return, Sartre said: ‘It is impossible to ...”

“... the place whereon thou standest is holy ground’. But Ora Horn Prouser says that the command ‘may simply appear to be about holiness’ when, actually, it defines the nature of the relationship between God and the Israelites. Captives are kept barefoot, and David fled barefooted from his son Absalom. Subjugation and ...”

“... start again, only to abandon this second attempt. A third attempt in 2000 gives way to a fourth in May 2002, which I put aside after three months and do not pick up again until October 2004, when my daughter returns from a trip to Madagascar with a little dictionary of Créole. In it I find the nursery rhyme which appears in the opening chapter: Waï, waï, mo ...”

“... Rogers, Ingrid Bergman and Mary Pickford joined a committee to welcome her to Hollywood, where David O. Selznick sponsored an evening in her honour during which the Los Angeles Philharmonic played ‘The Madame Chiang Kai-shek March’. (As she was travelling west, the inhabitants of one small town lined up to see her when her train stopped to take on ...”

“... thank goodness. For the present, we’re more or less in trenches again – but movement orders may come at any moment. I’m writing this in an Observation Post in the outpost line on a comparatively peaceful and sunny morning. Love to Billie and the youngsters.All his life Lewis was a scribbler of verse, and the habit endured in France. He wrote a long ...”

“... recordings could have data stripped from them and still sound as good. The information theorist David Huffman had also demonstrated that sonic regularities – a violin string vibrating at a steady pitch, say – could be encoded in such a way that they took up minimal data, then subsequently decoded and expanded into audio information at playback. On the ...”

“... of her look at all alike,’ Stephen Schiff wrote of Muriel Spark in 1993. ‘In one she may seem a sturdy English rose, in another a seductress staring down at her prey, in still another an intellectual prankster peeking wryly over her spectacles, and sometimes she looks merely square and oatmeal-faced, grinning wholesomely into too much ...”

“... He’s invariably linked with a group of US fiction writers around his age that includes the late David Foster Wallace, George Saunders, Jonathan Franzen and Jeffrey Eugenides. There are a few things that set Antrim apart: he’s Southern; his strongest affinity to a writer in the previous generation is to Donald Barthelme, not Don DeLillo; he’s the least ...”

“... Labour, had won comprehensively under a democratic franchise only five years before. Until 7 May the SNP’s best parliamentary performance had been in October 1974. The Conservative Party was the first of the major parties to lose its Scottish base. It won more than 50 per cent of the vote in Scotland in 1955, but its decay began as secularisation ...”

“... from the proclamation of the Commonwealth of Australia in 1901. ‘Frustrating though this may be,’ Porter argues, ‘confusion and complexity are generally a truer way of looking at things than certainty and simplicity.’ He proposes as a fanciful discipline that ‘we imperial historians agree to a moratorium on the “e”, “i”, and ...”

“... and its immobilisation in infrastructure – a ‘spatial fix’, in the words of the geographer David Harvey – is one progenitor of Xi’s grand initiative. China’s treatment by the US is another.In October 2011, Obama’s then secretary of state, Hillary Clinton, announced the birth of ‘America’s Pacific Century’ in an article for Foreign ...”

“... rescinded blacks’ right to vote almost entirely. Nathans notes these events, but not how they may have affected life on the Cameron land, or what strategies black purchasers deployed to hold onto their farms. It remains unclear how much the closing off of political participation influenced the decision to move to the North. Nathans notes that an oral ...”

“... as the most brilliant of his contemporaries at the bar:‘Do you not think that the African may well regard himself as oppressed and exploited by the white man?’        ‘Yes, in certain spheres of life.’        ‘And this is so whether he is a communist or non-communist?’        ‘Yes.’        ‘The black man ...”