“... homes, religious and patriotic decorations sat side by side: ‘a picture of the Saviour on one wall and one of J.L. Sullivan, the bare-knuckle fighter, opposite’. Oral tradition, too, entangled national identity and religion. (Samuel wasn’t interested only in oral history as a technique of the professional historian but in oral traditions as live ...”

“... which was festering in a way that was obvious even to the US officials who visited. When Richard Holbrooke, the US special representative, and Vice President Joe Biden met Karzai they immediately saw the problem. In 2009, Holbrooke and Karzai tried to rig the upcoming elections in different directions. In the resulting mess Karzai remained in ...”

“... Reagan rightly called (imitating Star Wars again) ‘the evil empire’. The fall of the Berlin Wall and America’s Cold War victory – 200 years after the ratification of the United States Constitution – made 1989 the ‘brilliant climactic year of the American century’, a triumph extended into the next century by the Gulf War. Even the covert ...”

“... trial, massacre, impoverishment and exile. All for him to join the dictators’ club? For Wales, Richard, for Wales? Arafat’s father, Abdel Raouf al-Qudwa al-Husseini, brought his children up with the illusion that he would win title to stolen ancestral property in Egypt. In pursuit of the elusive inheritance, Abdel Raouf, a mild man in a fez with oversize ...”

“... Post. He was, or seemed to be, on the verge of authentic global tycoonship. Henry Kissinger and Richard Perle were proud ornaments of the Hollinger board. After the end of his first marriage in 1991 Black married Barbara Amiel, a right-wing journalist who had been born in London, moved to Canada as a teenager, and made a name for herself as a polemicist ...”

“... net cast by most postmodernist critics (myself included): Dennis Oppenheim rather than Richard Serra, say, Gretchen Bender rather than Cindy Sherman. Although written by a critic in formation, these early texts anticipate many of his later concerns, especially when it comes to artists focused on perception and technology, from Blake and Turner to ...”

“... source’ and the ‘priestly source’ so paradigmatically that the biblical scholar Richard Elliott Friedman uses it to explain the documentary hypothesis in his book Who Wrote the Bible? (1987). Other interpretative problems include dating the Flood and measuring its extent. Where did the waters come from, and where did they go? As the English ...”

“... was probably what fuelled the King Mob operatives who daubed the long-lasting graffiti on a wall running alongside the Tube line between Ladbroke Grove and Westbourne Park: ‘Same thing day after day – tube – work – dinner – work – tube – armchair – TV – sleep – tube – work – how much more can you take? – one in ten go mad, one ...”

“... or seven main cast and crew and a grant of $10,000, supplemented by Lynch’s job delivering the Wall Street Journal. Jack Nance, who would become his friend and long-term collaborator, was cast as Henry. Lynchian figures move at strange speeds, and Nance has the waddling gait of Chaplin’s tramp. Almost every shot of him is a reaction shot but he reacts ...”

“... Frank [Beckett’s brother] can’t resist it much … It is nice to have Morning on one’s wall that is always morning, and a setting out without the coming home.’ Later both men wrote separately to McGreevy to say that they had bumped into one another at a donkey show in Dublin where Beckett had taken his mother, who was, he reported, ‘the picture ...”

“... and Memoirs – had covers easily recognisable as ‘SF art’. The jackets were designed by Richard Powers, whose unmistakable paintings were usually found on Ballantine mass-market paperbacks by Isaac Asimov, Frederik Pohl, Clifford Simak and others. Powers’s designs screamed of the ‘paraliterary’, of druggy, trippy, sci-fi – just the boy’s ...”

“... to drench the parade of Enlightenment optimism about human possibility. The Radical writer Richard Price reckoned that an expanding population was a good thing, and that it would follow inevitably from more virtuous forms of government. Condorcet foresaw endless social progress, an egalitarian society in which technological advance would provide for an ...”

“... Russia Modernise?, Fiona Hill and Clifford Gaddy’s Mr Putin: Operative in the Kremlin (2013) and Richard Sakwa’s Putin Redux (2014). New Year’s Eve 1999 – when Yeltsin appeared on Russian TV screens to announce his resignation as president in favour of Putin – is often taken to mark a major turning point, from the ‘fevered 1990s’ to the stability ...”

“... immigrants with criminal records … roaming free to threaten peaceful citizens’. Inspired by Richard Nixon’s speech in 1968 – a year when there were riots in major cities – he repeated ‘law and order’ four times, dramatically elongating the phrase: ‘I have a message to every last person threatening the peace on our streets and the safety of ...”

“... shelf. The buttocks and thighs of a muscular plaster torso, its front primly turned to face the wall, loom over the women below.By the 1820s, ateliers specialising in female tutelage were a fixture of the Paris art world. At least thirty female artists made their debut at the Louvre’s Salon between 1822 and 1827; in 1824, 101 female exhibitors showed a ...”