“... The radical journalist​, author and activist Richard Gott died last month at the age of 87. One of the ‘sharpest reporters of revolutionary Latin America’, according to his friend Tariq Ali, he reported for the Guardian on the aftermath of Pinochet’s coup and on Che Guevara, whose body he identified, and later wrote for the LRB on Chávez and Venezuela ...”

“... nearly died, and that the film was transformed by George Cukor, who came on set for a week after Richard Thorpe, the original director, was fired and before Victor Fleming took over. Cukor changed the bricks of the Yellow Brick Road from oval to rectangular and gave the Wicked Witch a bun to make her look scarier. He transformed Dorothy from blonde to ...”

“... floor, snug in their net sacks, 100,000 biodegradable balloons were ready for action. The great hall was flooded with the glare of insincerity: arc lights, monitors, the lamps of the world that brighten and recede. Every state in the union plays its part, hollering and placarding for their own, with a sense of being very democratically photographed, as if ...”

“... clue is in the name … the Party of workers, not shirkers.’ Byrne rented an apartment in County Hall overlooking the Thames, costing £2400 a month, courtesy of the taxpayer, and once claimed £400 of public money for food in a single month, quite legitimately in each case. Another example, more drastic, from the Conservatives: ‘...”

“... the elements that dress Seabrook’s whippy style: the Meades-to-camera performed prose, the music-hall delivery of arcane information. Seabrook is scornful of Colindale researchers, library hacks, scissors and paste men. You have to be there. You have to see it. Sniff the candy floss and petroleum jelly. ‘Peter Ackroyd never set foot in Margate for his ...”

“... of expression might – only might – cease to be perceived as a menace to national security. As Richard Sakwa’s book suggests, Putin has a choice of two directions. One is simply to ‘reconcentrate state power’. The other is to ‘reconstitute’ that power in a new form by imposing the rule of law. Putin talks a lot about ‘the dictatorship of ...”

“... films were Great Expectations and Kind Hearts and Coronets. Having impressed the composer Richard Rodgers (Rodgers and Hammerstein) in New York, she was invited to star in The King and I and did so at Drury Lane. Profumo did not immediately gain office when Churchill won the 1951 election, but a year later he became parliamentary undersecretary at the ...”

“... that these ‘docu-dramas’ are a new phenomenon, a modern hybrid. Those with long memories cite Richard Brooks’s 1967 film In Cold Blood as a prototype. Based on Truman Capote’s account of a quadruple murder in rural Kansas, the film was shot in vérité black and white and used the actual locations where the killings took place. But the true crime ...”

“... from these paintings and there they were: Lady Una Troubridge with a monocle in her eye; Radclyffe Hall in a marvellous hunting outfit with a terrific hunting hat. It was the all-time ultimate gallery of all the famous dykes from 1880 to 1935 or thereabouts.Barney walked round the room telling Capote about each picture painted by Brooks, her long-term ...”

“... have been a terrifying scene. The barons led by Montfort and Hugh Bigod marched into Westminster Hall in full armour, though they had the decency to leave their swords outside. Henry instantly appreciated the severity of his plight. ‘What is this, my lords, am I, poor wretch, your prisoner?’ In theory, he wasn’t, or not yet, but over the years of ...”

“... freedom of register was partly a result of his squirearchical background: he was a descendant of Richard Empson, a loathed minister of Henry VII, and grew up in a manor house in Yorkshire. He read maths and then English in the Cambridge of Wittgenstein and Bertrand Russell, but the biggest influence on him was his supervisor, I.A. Richards, who advocated ...”

“... like most of what I thought of then as ‘good music’, at one of the concerts in Leeds Town Hall 1950-52. By mistake I put on the second disc first, and so hear not the slow introduction but a section of the recitative by the soul of Gerontius on seeing the angel at the start of Part 2. It is a member of that family of wondrous beings who, ere the ...”

“... R.S. Thomas in 1996, was mostly about the poet’s Salinger-like resistance to his attentions; and Richard Burton’s recent effort on Bunting fills in the blanks by taking the poet’s work as straight biographical evidence, never the wisest course of action, much less where the author of Briggflatts is concerned.* Philip Larkin’s post-biography/Selected ...”

“... dummy. A mixture of the surreal, the whimsical and the macabre, with touches of the English music-hall tradition, its overdetermined atmosphere of seedy blowsiness is vaguely reminiscent of Archie Rice in Tony Richardson’s film of The Entertainer as well as early Graham Greene. The style is distinctive in the way it wanders in and out of interiority, with ...”

“... and that ‘almost every character is real’ – his sole invention being their pursuer, Richard Nayler, mockingly saluted by James, duke of York, as ‘our regicide-hunter-in-chief’.The New England experiences of Whalley and Goffe are not unknown to historians; Christopher Pagliuco’s The Great Escape of Edward Whalley and William Goffe ...”