“... 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 ...”

“... with Chesterfield collars, speaking expansively of ‘business’ and ‘finance’, with the Wall Street Journal tucked under an elbow. None of them owned anything. The YMCA lobby was their sole arena of operations. ‘I knew that I could live there no longer,’ says the nameless narrator who provides the title for Invisible Man, Ellison’s only ...”

“... spasm shook his body which seems riddled with bullets.’ As an encore Nijinsky stood facing the wall and made some strange movements like a ‘mad magician’. When he got home Nijinsky wrote in a diary he had begun earlier the same day his account of the evening: ‘In the carriage I told my wife that today was the day of my marriage with God.’ A few ...”

“... smell of newly minted banknotes. Far from being offended by my pushiness, she would go to the wall as if in a trance, and remove the drawing off its hook. Once the haggling had ended, ‘we would sit side by side on her unmade Lucite bed with a pile of dollar bills between us . . . Madame counted slowly out loud, and every time she reached a hundred she ...”

“... extended essay, unfinished on his death in 2003 – the pages about 1944-45 have been written by Richard Neustadt. There is much to be gained from Jenkins’s insights but Patrick Renshaw’s study, though equally succinct, is much more substantial. Renshaw is a specialist in American economic and labour history, and, as might be expected, his book has most ...”

“... political officer in the Middle East. Clayton’s successor, appointed at Weizmann’s urging, was Richard Meinertzhagen, an ardent Zionist and an anti-semitic Christian. ‘I am imbued with anti-semitic feelings,’ he wrote in a diary passage quoted by Segev. A few years later, Weizmann asked Churchill to remove Congreve as well. Churchill complied. Zionist ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... Goldwater’s defeat, however, the campaign became a mission to show that liberal Republicans like Richard Nixon were no longer the only option for the right. Buckley ran as the leader of the Conservative Party against his fellow Yale Republican John Lindsay. He called for the abolition of unions, tough policing, welfare restrictions, bicycle lanes and a New ...”

“... on the evening before the Commons debate. In the words of the independently minded Conservative Richard Shepherd, all we ‘knew about the Bill was what I believe the country will come to detest more than anything – the manipulation, the spin, the press releases and all the covert ways of trying to secure the legislation of this country without reference ...”

“... books. I hear a voice beside me say: ‘He was a real people-person.’ There is a display on the wall of things-from-1963: a poster for Psycho, a programme for a new musical starring Richard Burton and Julie Andrews called Camelot, an advertisement for Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf? There is a row of books from the ...”

“... him and the best days of his childhood. He and his wife are like that throughout the film: off the wall but happy with life and with each other. They are not bland or aimless, they are skittish and dangerous, but they know fun when they see it, and the pleasure of this recognition is contagious. The roller-coaster shot focuses the mood of the whole ...”

“... The tension between party members and elected representatives, however, is congenital in Labour: Richard Crossman observed in 1968 that the nominal sovereignty given to the party conference was vitiated in practice by the freedom given to MPs in matters of political judgment. Perversely, the unremitting attacks from his own MPs made it more difficult, not ...”

“... I never have found out whether it was the personality that was disordered, or a crack in the wall of personality that threatened to flood my self into nowhere if I didn’t keep a hold on it. I think that BPD was really a diagnosis meaning a young woman who didn’t do as she was told and they didn’t know how to deal with it). Anyway, before all that ...”

“... author also of Amazing Grace: The Story of America’s Most Beloved Song and a biography of Cliff Richard – can’t be unaware of the implied contrast with the Paschal lamb of Exodus 12.46 and the fulfilment of the Scripture in the Gospel of John, chapter 19 (‘Then came the soldiers, and brake the legs of the first, and of the other which was crucified ...”