“... than the downfall of Willy Brandt. He studiously plays down the poison-tipped umbrellas and cross-border kidnappings (they were rare, he argues, a sign of weakness), just as he predictably plays the moral equivalence card for all it’s worth. In this game of universal cockups, the CIA’s activities provide the usual aid and comfort for everybody ...”

“... on its properties’ colonial connections. The resignation in October of the trust’s chairman, Tim Parker, widely hyped in the same places as a victory against ‘wokeness’, was coincidental (his two-term tenure had come to an end, having been extended for a year because of the pandemic).None of this made any difference to Dowden, who while still culture ...”

“... brothels were not the ‘antics’ or ‘frivolous gestures’ that Manning labels them, and as Tim Harris has shown, they did not die out at the Civil War. In another revealing sentence, Manning declares that a simple enclosure riot was ‘hardly more than a skimmington, and thus a fairly primitive form of social protest’. This surely indicates a serious ...”

“... a recognition of its power; and the cut of the dagger or razor, over or through the image of the Cross, registers a kind of reading. There is a similar mixing of desire and fear on display in a copy of The Descrypcyon of Englonde (1502) held by the Society of Antiquaries in London. Page after page of this history of Britain is covered with blocks of black ...”

“... book made a lot of people furious, but was hardly New Jersey’s Salman Rushdie. True, my one-week cross-country American book tour had been a mite intense. ‘We’re going to rip you to shreds,’ a woman doctor hissed at me in the corridor of a Baltimore television studio. ‘Bullets are too good for you!’ snarled a pony-tailed man in army fatigues at a ...”

“... Great Depression: ‘When fascism comes to America, it will be wrapped in the flag and carrying a cross.’ According to Hedges, an evangelical movement in the United States is trying to establish a government based on scripture rather than the constitution. This movement, he argues, is not interested in dialogue or rational thought. It will distort, suppress ...”

“... account of ‘the making of the modern world’ opens our eyes to the degree of international cross-fertilisation, especially in the 1930s and 1940s, when large-scale manufacturing was coming into its own. Henry Ford was a global icon who counted Hitler among his admirers. As soon as he took power, Hitler had tried hard but in vain to make German car ...”

“... and the CEOs of Silicon Valley’s biggest firms. It took place on the 25th floor of Trump Tower. Tim Cook from Apple was there, along with Sheryl Sandberg from Facebook and Amazon’s Jeff Bezos, as well as the heads of Microsoft, Cisco, Oracle, Intel and IBM. The symbolism was clear: Thiel was now the man to bring tech money and political power ...”

“... dumb.’ Beaverbrook comes over as an absolute ruler, but not a bully. Davie was inquisited and cross-questioned (and soon after, like the outstanding talent he is, snatched up for the Evening Standard). What impresses in every account of the man is that quality of being interested and interesting. It is a more attractive picture than his papers left, for ...”

“... fashion magnate and fled from a bad conscience. Two American couples are also in Paris. Joe Flynn (Tim Robbins) is a sports reporter who is asked by his paper to stay over in Paris to cover the apparent murder. He dictates his stories over the telephone, plagiarising them from television broadcasts. His relationship with a fashion reporter from Houston (Julia ...”

“... growth-driven capitalism is what we’ve got; it isn’t going away anytime soon; let’s cross our fingers and work with it. One gets the sense that this is where Carney, now UN special envoy on climate action and finance, has ended up. He has rallied virtually every significant financial institution in the world (commanding between them some $130 ...”

“... sense of some interesting oddities in the plot. Seeing the sea captain as a people smuggler, as in Tim Supple’s TV film of 2003, brings out the tension in Viola’s strangely pacifying and edgy way of talking to him: ‘There is a fair behaviour in thee, captain … I pray thee, and I’ll pay thee bounteously.’ Why does he still have Viola’s ‘maid’s ...”

“... which Browning found himself so cruelly and (as he thought) unjustly bereft. As Stefan Hawlin and Tim Burnett point out in their absorbing and meticulously detailed account of the poem’s genesis and publication, the fact that Browning had not finished writing the poem when its first instalments appeared enabled him to gauge something of the British ...”

“... and reluctant reply from a steward (I never met this man, but his prose style suggested tight cross-gartering). His Lordship was away indefinitely: the house was shut up and empty: my request could not be entertained. I did go to Wimborne St Giles one day while I was revising the doctorate as a book, just to double-check whether there was a visible ...”

“... Dead’ and the imagined deaths of both the protagonist (Scrooge) and a child (Tiny Tim) in A Christmas Carol. Lévi-Strauss is more convincing in his discussion of lying: ‘The only difference between Father Christmas and a true deity is that adults do not believe in him, although they encourage their children to do so and maintain this belief ...”