“... Richard Branson​ is the mirror image of a Russian oligarch. This is not to say that where they are bad, he is good. If even half the things in Tom Bower’s new biography are true, Branson is far from being good. He is playing the same game as his Russian counterparts, but it’s the looking-glass version. Where they do their best to avoid the glare of publicity, he thrives on it ...”

“... happened, his fate wasn’t decided by a jury, but instead became enmeshed with the debacle at the White House and the scandal surrounding the Republican Party’s burglary of the offices of the Democratic National Committee in the Watergate office building. Nixon was never enthusiastic about using legal means to try to stop the New York Times from publishing ...”

“... there occurred in Harlem such a flowering of music, dance, theatre and painting as to change white American perceptions of African American artistic expression. In a little over a decade, more books by black Americans appeared in print than had been published in the entire history of black American writing. In December 1923, Opportunity, the mouthpiece ...”

“... the great aloneness together like they were in some B-grade movie’). Settlements – aboriginal, white or a mixture of both – regularly gave her a respite from the labours of her trek, and once she flew back to Alice Springs from some airstrip in order to consult the vet. But eventually she wended her way across half Australia, even if the last fifty miles ...”

“... a self-advertisement worthy of a base politician. Archigram was a reaction to the purity of the white orthogonal architecture of the 1920s and early 1930s championed by Nikolaus Pevsner, the most conservative of progressives, who described English architecture of the 1950s as ‘not the functionally best solution, nor an economically justifiable ...”

“... in which Mephistopheles encourages Faust to dance with her. The episode intrigued artists. Richard Westall exhibited Faust and Lilith at the Royal Academy exhibition in 1831. His Lilith is a naked, milky-skinned babe, with rosy-red lips and pert breasts, her modesty obscured by a piece of ...”

“... drawings and photographs. Architecture is the main focus, represented both in archival images and Richard Pare’s remarkable photographs from the 1990s and 2000s; there is also a selection of works by artists such as Rodchenko, Popova, Lissitzky and others, demonstrating the extent to which the concerns of the different branches of the arts were intertwined ...”

“... alters the angle of her body, making it less weighty, less obscure, more available. It softens the white orb of the gas light, effaces the scratched sparks of light. The fingerprints that register Degas’s own bodily presence disappear. Yet the visible plate mark in the extended pastel is a reminder of the far darker image below. Starker still is the ...”

“... most splendid case of this in Shakespeare’s early drama is of course the king known as Richard Crookback. The chronology of the early writing being as vexed as it is, it’s hard to say whether Richard III precedes The Two Gentlemen of Verona. But the character has all the compelling, attention-focusing quality I ...”

“... They were, frankly, terrifying. I also remember the shame I felt at seeing a lone middle-aged white woman from the Sash remain impassively by the flame while the rest of us scattered at their onslaught. They knocked her down and stamped on her stomach time and again and yet she made no sound. The Black Sash were the real thing. Jill Wentzel has fought the ...”

“... Of course, we should have reservations about the use of anecdote as a basis for public policy. Richard Posner once remarked that the United States is a nation of more than a quarter-billion people closely watched by a horde of journalists. Every bad thing that can happen will happen and it will be reported; so it may be worth not panicking until we see ...”

“... on the composition of a particular fashion shot – a model walking towards him on a black and white marble floor in Versailles while a colonnade recedes behind her – he shrugged aside the compliment: ‘No, it was just there.’ ‘It’ being the shot, coming amicably towards him. He had, he claimed, remained ‘an incorrigible little boy’. His ...”

“... pressing if less explicit task is to remind herself of the person she is when not just being Mrs Richard Dalloway: ‘What she loved was this, here, now, in front of her; the fat lady in the cab.’ For a moment, wrapped in the sound and scent of the Bond Street flower shop, like the young Woolf caught up in the buzz and croon outside Talland House, she ...”

“... letters supposedly showing Parnell’s complicity in the Phoenix Park murders had been forged by Richard Pigott. The Commission Report did seem to support the Tory case that Irish agrarian violence had been in part because of, and not in spite of, the Land League’s advocacy of non-violent action. But after the Pigott debacle who was ready to make capital ...”

“... when an apparent suicide pilot crashed a single-engined Cessna airplane on the south lawn of the White House in 1994, jokers suggested it might be the CIA director trying to get an appointment with the president. The anti-Communist revolt that began at Herat in western Afghanistan in March 1979 originated in a government initiative to teach girls to ...”