“... decathlon, and commented as ‘her eyes rimmed red and her voice grew soft’: ‘That was a good day. But the last couple of days were better.’ It’s as if – even allowing for the additional pathos injected by Buzz Bissinger, who wrote the famous piece on Jenner for Vanity Fair – the photographic session, rather than hormones or surgery, were the ...”

“... for a long time privileged zones – the terrains of St John Philby and Robert Byron, of Norman Douglas and Patrick Leigh-Fermor, of R.W.Seton-Watson and Rebecca West. Sorties farther afield – like Peter Fleming’s expeditions to the Gobi or Matto Grosso – were fewer. Paradoxically, the vast expanse of the Empire itself was not fertile soil for this ...”

“... inspired by her reading of James Baldwin) and De l’autre côté (2002, filmed in Agua Prieta and Douglas, on either side of the US-Mexico border), use the same formal strategies as D’Est. If, in Europe, there were ‘murders or even genocides because of or in the name of an excess of history: history of territory and land, race, religion’, in America, a ...”

“... territory, but with another curious turn. For this strange emotion – what Douglas Adams might have called ‘the long toothache of the soul’ – isn’t a late 20th-century Hollywood add-on, but Tolkien himself, through and through. He theorised it in his 1938 lecture ‘On Fairy-Stories’ as ‘a fleeting glimpse of Joy beyond the ...”

“... than the crime itself . . . and adds a second defilement to the first’. Justice William Douglas came close. He saw Furman’s conviction as invalid because it was ‘pregnant with discrimination’ and because, more generally, a sort of moral evolution had brought society to a point where the death penalty – like branding, torture and public ...”

“... that, with his sense of history, he means the Lloyd George who was the patron of Field Marshal Douglas Haig, and the guarded admirer of Hitler, just as much as he means the Lloyd George who was the father of Welsh Disestablishment. And one must suppose that he comprehends FDR the originator of the war economy, and FDR the prime mover of American ...”