“... York Review of Books (15 January) Shaul Bakhash reported on the increased presence in Teheran of power centres, all of them vying for authority and for better positions in the coming battle for the succession. If we add to this the boasts that have emanated from Israel (Uri Lubrani, the man who supervised Israeli operations in Pahlavi Iran, and who remains ...”

“... of sexual indiscretion in Washington, partly for his own prurient needs and partly for the ends of power. He caused blackmail letters to be sent from the FBI to Dr Martin Luther King, urging him to commit suicide.Historians and journalists have never quite known what to do about these sorts of disclosure. They have never known whether to treat such episodes as ...”

“... coding skills for his intelligence work in China. He remained throughout Mao’s superior, with power of command over him.In 1930 regional tensions in the Red Army base area, over-determined by factional conflicts in the CCP as the Comintern changed its line on China, triggered violent purges of party fighters and militants, ordered or covered by Mao ...”

“... Diaries and, of course, Peter Ackroyd’s gold-brick biography of Blake. Bennett, Ackroyd and Jonathan Miller – these were the figures who mattered most. The Christmas parcels of English literature. Enough of threadbare bohemia, paranoid narcissism, chemical tourism through the Third World. Enough of ill-disciplined prose and rootless lives. Enough of ...”

“... as Roark (Rand was delighted: Cooper was famously right-wing) and Patricia Neal as Dominique. Jonathan Romney, reviewing a 1998 re-release, admired the ‘monumentalist oppressiveness’ of the art direction, then remarked on how strange it was to see the noble Gary Cooper professing not the usual love-of-the-little-fellow tosh, but the joys of the ...”

“... every minute of every day since these events happened … on doing everything possible within our power to nail down the facts.’ The administration’s tone had hardened by 27 August, when Jay Carney, Obama’s press secretary, told reporters – without providing any specific information – that any suggestions that the Syrian government was not ...”

“... vision of the way the world works. It substitutes the facticity and malign power of a single commodity for the more complex and partly non-factual imperatives of capital accumulation. Almost invariably, this line of argument turns on a plotting of personal connections, Big Oil business networks, and the revolving door of ...”

“... reptiles’ represent George II’s standing army; spreading ‘lilies’ herald the growing power of Louis XV; and, at the poem’s climax, a Hanoverian ‘horse’ (the ‘pale horse’ that would reappear in Shebbeare’s sixth letter) slowly drains the blood of the ‘lion’ of Britain.Johnson could have published the prophecy as a mysterious ...”

“... and Smith’s – disappeared, her English spinsters and clerics were deemed unlikely to sell. Jonathan Cape, Pym’s long-term publisher, summarily rejected Pym’s seventh novel, An Unsuitable Attachment, and she began fourteen long years in literary limbo. Her rediscovery came in 1977. Two influential fans, Philip Larkin and Lord David Cecil, named her ...”

“... negative publicity? Do we think there is any guarantee that a further strengthened institutional power will only be wielded against those whose views and politics we abhor? If we say yes, what picture of power – theirs and ours – does that presume?To which​ a devil’s advocate might say: isn’t that a mug’s ...”

“... presenter tries to gag him – he tells the English about ‘a poem by one of your great writers, Jonathan Quick. This guy in the poem is madly in love with a woman called Celia, but he sees her commode just after she’s had a shit and he can’t take it.’ A broadcast phone call from Mrs Thatcher keeps the Russian monster on the air: ‘If one is dealing ...”

“... or smugness. Selves, in other words, are always split hierarchically, in terms of internal power relations; the strongest parts of the self supposedly causing (i.e. coercing) the weaker parts; being, in a sense, irresistibly persuasive. As Octavio Paz says in his illuminating Introduction to A Centenary Pessoa, an essential guide to and useful ...”

“... to the universal church. Even if we wish to “maintain our own catholicity” we do not have the power to do so except in our relations with other churches. To maintain an isolated independence is, then, to deny catholicity.’ Dr Runcie has evidently enjoyed wrestling with this problem but recognises that many will find it boring. ‘It is not ...”

“... in an argument that conceives these pastoral leases as ‘sui generis grants’, in the words of Jonathan Fulcher, ‘designed for Australia’s unique conditions’ and, to this extent, ‘instruments unknown to the common law’. In the Kimberley region of Western Australia, some Aboriginal communities live in small fenced-off ‘excisions’ on large ...”

“... were probably closed two-thirds of the time. Biographers, notably Katherine Duncan-Jones and Jonathan Bate, have struggled to determine the impact plague had on Shakespeare’s life and work. Did Shakespeare flee London during extended outbreaks, and so spend much of the first decade of the 17th century with his family in Stratford? Did he continue ...”