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“... a gathering in Moscow of top-level participants in the 1962 Cuban missile crisis, from both the White House and the Kremlin: they were meeting to discuss how those events unfolded in each capital, and how decisions were made on each side, almost minute by minute. One of the participants was Andrei Gromyko, just before his recent retirement as President of ...”

“... double-height gallery that covers the interwar years, the heyday of stylish sea travel. Black and white film re-creates the central staircase of a first-class dining room, the focal point for onboard society, down which passengers ‘drifted’, as a description of the Paris in 1921 put it, under the eyes of languid bystanders, leaning out from swirling art ...”

“... crime, and a number of witnesses from the car park pointed to him as having been the man in the white shirt. The fact that seven of these nine witnesses later recanted appeared to have little influence on the final outcome. Desmond Tutu got involved. So did Pope Benedict. But it was the millions of Twitter users who seemed most powerfully in attendance ...”

“... attempting to apply the lessons of the US civil rights struggle to a country where the black-white ratio is quite the reverse of what it is in the US. (When Henry Ford, on last visiting his investments in South Africa, was questioned about his company’s policy on black employment, he actually boasted of Ford’s ‘proud record towards ...”

“... the scene even more touching. 6 February. I am reading a history of the Yorkshire Dales by Robert White, one of a series, Landscape through Time, published by English Heritage. During the enclosures of the 18th and 19th centuries, most of the land enclosed was added to existing farms, but in 1809 John Hulton used the land allotted to him from the enclosure of ...”

“... At the beginning of 1997, when Bill Clinton had just defeated Bob Dole, and his pursuer Kenneth Starr was visibly failing to pierce the Arkansas omertà – two of the Clintons’ companions in sordid deals sat silently in prison rather than testify – the annual State of the Union speech offered the perfect opportunity to reassert the full authority of a twice-elected President ...”

“... philosophising and artistic sophistication. When, in his television series Civilisation (1969), Kenneth Clark asked himself, ‘What is civilisation?’, the answer was: ‘I don’t know … But I think that I can recognise it when I see it.’ What Clark recognised was very much the ‘Western Civ’ idea, stretching back to the Ancient Greeks and given ...”

“... photograph’, said to have been taken by a London gynaecologist called Robert Kenneth Wilson. (It’s still the best-known image: something like Rod Hull’s Emu in grainy profile.) The monster’s celebrity is bound up with the rise of tabloids and motor trips; as Byrne notes in a video interview shown in the gallery foyer, the loch is a ...”

“... whose words the whole dedication turns: John Webster, in the note ‘To the Reader’ before The White Devil. Browning’s Elizabethanised play has its affinities with Webster: moreover, it was canny of him to emend Webster’s prefatory words so as to reduce them to a single-minded praise of Shakespeare (and then of Landor). For these are not the very words ...”

“... in hues of crimson and beige, dangle between his legs like a phalanx of inverted onion domes. Kenneth Doolittle (1932) shows one of Neel’s lovers, a sailor with leftist sympathies and an opium addiction, fast asleep, his naked form captured by her characteristic dark, unbroken outline – arms folded over his chest, legs spread, one knee bent. A ...”

“... image – Magritte’s A Key of Dreams – also to be centred. Inside, the imagery was black and white, and the text was entirely set in bold, so as to have the same weight as the pictures. Hollis liked to share the credit for his irreverent design with the then art editor at BBC Books, Peter Campbell, who designed the LRB and many of its covers, and with ...”

“... Alexander Stephens, observed, ‘upon the great truth that the negro is not equal to the white man; that slavery subordination to the superior race is his natural and normal condition.’Lincoln did not believe that the federal government had the authority to do anything about slavery in the states in ordinary circumstances. He ...”

“... range from newspaper editors to political historians, it may make very little difference. As John Kenneth Galbraith has observed, changing the top man in important business corporations rarely affects the price of their shares on the market. A rapid glance at the history of the USA also suggests scepticism about the impact of individual leaders. That great ...”

“... was his name and dates of birth and death. This has proved to be an exaggeration. Thanks to Kenneth Robinson (whose revised Wilkie Collins, A Biography came out in 1974) and now, preeminently, to William Clarke, we now know much more – especially about Collins’s family affairs, or scandals, as they would have seemed to his contemporaries. As its ...”

“... likely Jocasta, being considerably younger than Othello, as the Moor is keenly aware, and also white, Green has an ingenious answer: ‘It is as if in binding himself in love to the object furthest removed from his mother – not other than his mother, but exactly the converse – it is still his mother that he finds.’ The same reasoning allows Green to ...”