“... when she marched against the imminent executions of Sacco and Vanzetti. But it was as a dirndl-wearing member of the Hollywood Popular Front that Parker became serious about organising. Her main work was for the Screen Writers Guild and the Hollywood Anti-Nazi League, of which she was a founding member. She also helped to finance Joris Ivens’s film The ...”

“... he have been recognised by the man who met the Incorruptible strolling in the Bois de Boulogne, wearing a waistcoat embroidered with roses?The present book contains 16 essays about what Robespierre thought, what he did, and how he has been perceived and interpreted, not only by historians but by playwrights and novelists. There are chapters on his ideology ...”

“... her and forced her into his car. Its remit has now been expanded: it will also look at how David Carrick, nicknamed ‘Bastard Dave’ by his colleagues in the Met, raped and sexually assaulted at least twelve women over a period of seventeen years without being prosecuted. The Casey report into ‘standards and culture’ at the Met, prompted by the ...”

“... comes to life with a burst of scene-setting worthy of Enid Blyton and the Famous Five. ‘He was wearing a yachting cap set well back on a mop of black curls and his eyes were bright slits in the weatherbeaten face.’ The strain of delivering a text worthy of the censorious Dalgleish cruelly exposes a gush of generic clichés that would be inoffensive in a ...”

“... do I think ...’ Much of what critics like Louis Menand (in the New York Review of Books) and David Denby (in the New Yorker) have said about Eyes Wide Shut is true. The timing is terrible, the dialogue is wooden and Tom Cruise is worse than you can imagine any reasonably competent actor could be. He has only one gesture – a sketch of a wave of the ...”

“... scenario presented to a guilty American conscience was too tempting to pass up – children began wearing bracelets with the names of pows stamped on them. Fonda was the Eve that threatened it. The anti-war movement, Hershberger demonstrates, was good for pows. Sometimes it secured their early release. It also kept them in touch with their families, something ...”

“... as the language of the most obscurantist communities. Speaking Polish or German, and wearing a ‘German jacket’, were ways used by the pioneers of emancipation in Warsaw to distinguish themselves. In any case, the children of Yiddish-speaking immigrants in German schools found themselves handicapped by their grammatical usages, correct enough ...”

“... clubs and coffee-houses of London’s blossoming West End, and the perfect clownish counterfoil to David Garrick’s smouldering tragic hero. In his heyday in the 1760s, a summer season at the Haymarket theatre earned his company up to £5000, which may be multiplied a hundredfold for its value today. He had a townhouse on Suffolk Street, round the corner from ...”

“... Sasser and Paul Sarbanes; and, as an apparent afterthought, one of Bourke’s summer neighbours, David Rockefeller. Getting wind of the commercial initiative, the NIH offered Venter more power, more autonomy and even more money, and in the UK the Wellcome responded similarly in support of the Medical Research Council’s sequencing work. By this time, Venter ...”

“... The ludicrous Mr Kenneth Baker blames the Church, and in particular the Bishop of Liverpool, David Sheppard, probably because he’s the only socialist in sight.22 February. A large crowd gathers outside Bootle Magistrates Court, to jeer as the vans carrying the two ten-year-olds accused of the toddler’s murder are driven away. One man eludes the ...”

“... new recruits inspired by the example of Khomeini himself. Hizbullah ‘had two progenitors’, David Hirst wrote in his seminal book on Lebanon, Beware of Small States (2010). ‘If Iran was one – with Syria, so to speak, as midwife – Israel was unquestionably the other. Iran furnished the model and the means, Syria the facilities, Israel – with its ...”

“... a last gesture he seems to have gone to a theatre and a brothel, and had himself photographed wearing a heavy, ill-fitting coat and a long-suffering look.’ He is always drily funny on the subject of Joyce’s finances: ‘James saw no reason to limit his brother’s sacrifices to genius, especially when genius had a family to support.’ And there are ...”

“... be cut. Or a future government could choose to abolish them, as the radical free marketeers of David Lange’s Labour Party did when they came to power in New Zealand in the 1980s. Many British farmers support Brexit. Others fear it would destroy them. The National Farmers Union has come out against, arguing that without subsidies, most British farms would ...”

“... one, he captured a German colonel by thrusting a swagger stick into his back. He went into action wearing a cap modified to droop around his ears (he declined to wear a British-style steel helmet), a thick turtleneck sweater, highly polished cavalry boots and, draped around his neck, a seven-foot puce muffler knitted by his mother. He refused to use a ...”

“... centre. When Saakashvili and his followers burst though the parliament doors in November he was wearing a flak jacket under his coat, but it was a red rose, not an AK-47, that he flourished in front of him. Shevardnadze, tired and cynical but still wise, could have used gunmen to stop him but chose not to. All the same, the danger from Saakashvili’s other ...”