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“... that draw attention to himself – he actually seems to relish it. The reason he is currently held in such opprobrium is that his Real Madrid side lost to Barcelona after adopting astonishingly negative tactics in their Champions League semi-final. It was hideous to watch. But it said two things about Mourinho: first, he wasn’t frightened of risking a ...”

“... and delay at the other end. Kurosawa almost literally suspends Sato in the booth, in a long shot held for 25 seconds, while the hotel manager flirts clumsily with the receptionist in the foreground. The thief escapes. As Sato leaves the booth in pursuit, the receiver dangles. He is shot down outside. Kurosawa, unlike Wyler, does not provide an intermediary ...”

“... of a stick, leaning on his son’s arm. Under the trousers, of course, were the iron braces that held his legs erect but, to political observers in 1928, FDR no longer seemed crippled, merely ‘lame’. It was a brilliant piece of spin, but also evidence of genuine improvement – testimony to years of relentless physical exercise. He seems to have been ...”

“... the 18 December meeting of the 1922 Committee Eden was forced to admit that he no longer ‘held in his head’ the details of Britain’s treaty obligations in the Middle East, at which point even his most loyal supporters lost confidence in his ability to carry on). In January, he resigned on the grounds of ill health, allowing his chancellor to ...”

“... over his life and over his conduct as a leader of the Revolution, and what is soon evident about David Lawday’s spirited and highly readable biography is that he stands Danton in a flattering light and pays insufficient attention to movements in the shadows. ‘The Gentle Giant of Terror’, the subtitle calls him: which suggests, along with revolutionary ...”

“... of sin. Is this ‘artful whiteface mockery of pious racists’? In his new biography of Wheatley, David Waldstreicher encourages us to think so, and to read the lines in a ‘mocking or satirical instead of a beseeching voice’, so that we can hear Wheatley ‘become the organic intellectual of the enslaved’.The poem shows Wheatley working within narrow ...”

“... of freeing the hostages and punishing their captors only by sacking the place where they had been held. The ‘higher principles of humanity’ he sought to uphold were not what we would now call the higher principles of humanitarianism. Rather, they were the principles of biblical justice, the idea that wrongdoers would be pursued, no matter how far ...”

“... some form of independence: Sinn Fein won 73 of 105 seats in the General Election of 1918, the last held over the island of Ireland. The prospects for Unionism did not look good. However, by the end of the War of Independence three years later, Carson and Craig had succeeded in keeping six of the nine counties of Ulster out of the new Irish Free State. They did ...”

“... was L’Étoile rose, published in 1978, polemical, didactic and occasionally soupy. The narrator, David, welcomes the arrival of the word ‘gay’ in France from America, comparing it to the dove returning to Noah’s Ark with its message of hope, though he admits it hasn’t quite taken to its new habitat. In the new memoir as well as in L’Étoile rose ...”

“... by a kind of anti-intellectual wisdom, schooled in that harsh world Samuel Johnson endlessly held up to the face of the bon ton: ‘Slow rises worth, by poverty depressed.’ Porter’s 18th century forms a counter-world to conventional evocations of that age. The expression ‘Georgian’ is meant to convey an 18th century with all the sleaze taken ...”

“... with the press, while Harold Wilson could never wholly hide the peculiar fascination which it held for him. His relations with the Lobby ranged from love affair to stormy divorce. James Callaghan lacked Wilson’s flair as a political news editor but took a self-conscious pride in his acquired mastery of the trade’s little tricks. ‘You know the ...”

“... good: the best that could be hoped for was that it would do no harm. The Education Act of 1902 held the field until 1944 and was Balfour’s major legislative achievement. Yet he did not much believe in education, at least for the poorer classes. His interest in the Education Bill was, as Mr Mackay points out, primarily partisan. He acted to help his ...”

“... to produce a tiny tour de force by using three successive auditory analogies then he has held out against it, though the reading brain is likely to supply the sliding scrape of loaded hangers, the jangle of empty ones – the lightness of ‘flick’ suggests wire hangers, whatever Joan Crawford would have had to say about that. (This is not a dressy ...”

“... to the rubbish bin – and so it was a great deal easier, after the failure of the Camp David summit last July, to claim, as Clinton and Barak have done, that the Palestinians were to blame for the impasse, rather than the Israelis, whose position remains that the 1967 territories are not to be returned. The US press has referred again and again to ...”

“... defend their communities turned into licensed bandits and racketeers when they took power in rebel-held enclaves. It wasn’t that reporters were factually incorrect in their descriptions of what they had seen. But the very term ‘war reporter’, though not often used by journalists themselves, helps explain what went wrong. Leaving aside its macho ...”