“... his fellow directors stood to be prosecuted in the UK under the 2000 Regulation of Investigatory Powers Act and in the US under the Foreign Corrupt Practices Act. Having covered up its activities for years, News Corp reached for the disinfectant and hired the City law firm Linklaters. With their help, a News International unit, the Management and Standards ...”

“... there are poems that combine curses, doomed love, the sea and the elegy, such as ‘The Death of Richard Wagner’, whose penultimate stanza describes the effect of hearing his music: As a vision of heaven from the hollows of         ocean, that none but a god might see, Rose out of the silence of things unknown of                 a ...”

“... from alcohol and ‘adhered to the old belief that indulging in sex reduced a musician’s powers’. Shankar spent the next seven years with him in devotional study.Baba’s philosophy of music was rooted in the idea of gharana – the passing of an artistic tradition from one generation to the next, through example and explanation. As the months and ...”

“... African Revenue Service. A raft of experienced officers were lost and the agency’s investigative powers curtailed. KPMG, which audited the Guptas for fifteen years, wrote off Vega’s wedding costs as a business expense. PwC, the auditor of South African Airways, concluded that the company was in compliance with regulations, when it was actually being ...”

“... German killed (elsewhere it had been even worse: fifty for every German). Kappler – played by Richard Burton in George P. Cosmatos’s film Massacre in Rome (1973) – had to come up with names very quickly: the killings were to be carried out within 24 hours of the attack. In the film we see Burton at a desk, adding the names of political prisoners, men ...”

“... as the baby’s middle name, and who gave the child the surname of her estranged husband, Richard Aldington, though he was not the father.But let’s back up: Hilda Doolittle was born in Bethlehem, Pennsylvania in 1886, the only daughter and second child of the second marriage of Charles Doolittle, professor of astronomy and mathematics and Civil War ...”

“... who is living it or to those around him. Dworkin recalls the words of the princes’ murderer in Richard III:                                                We smothered The most replenished sweet work of nature, That from the prime creation e’er she framed. At the same time, we cherish the fact that a life ...”

“... neo-colonial instinct than, as de Gaulle saw it, a more commendable wish to face up to the great powers. De Gaulle preached the notion that France should have ‘a great intelligence service – like the British’. Nonetheless, though he placed his own men in the SDECE, he seems to have remained largely preoccupied with arranging coups and counter-coups in ...”

“... the Oxford Movement pullulated with passionate attachments; two of the most frank avowals, which Richard Jenkyns quotes in his masterly study of the Victorian conception of Ancient Greece, came from Disraeli. Of course there were in the Nineties the Uranians and the aesthetes, disciples of Cory or Symonds or Carpenter, who justified their inclinations by ...”

“... famous episode of Lewis’s life, especially as represented, and perhaps somewhat travestied, in Richard Attenborough’s 1993 film Shadowlands. In 1952 Lewis met and developed some form of relationship with (was single-mindedly pursued by?) a noisy, unhappily married, not very successful, American freelance writer 16 years younger than he was. In 1955 Joy ...”

“... generations. He also scoured his bottom drawer for material. The longest of the lives, that of Richard Savage, was substantially a reprint of a monument to a feckless and garrulous friend that Johnson had published in 1744. Johnson’s critique of Pope’s epitaphs from 1756 was appended to his ‘Life of Pope’, even though it provides an incongruously ...”

“... Marxism but is signed J.H. Hexter. It is entitled ‘Property, Monopoly and Shakespeare’s Richard II’ and it appeared in a collective volume, Culture and Politics: From Puritanism to the Enlightenment (1980). Hexter demonstrates very convincingly that ‘the inheritance of real property is the heart’ of Shakespeare’s play. Shakespeare ...”

“... unworthy of them, a rather ordinary man eclipsed by a crew of fantastic heroes with supernatural powers: Orpheus who can out-sing the Sirens, the Boread brothers who can out-wing the Harpies with feathers discreetly attached to their hands and feet, Euphemus who can walk on water, Lynceus who can see underground. They take one look at Jason and elect ...”

“... only rhapsodic, that he is a practical writer as well as a vatic one, that he has not only superb powers of visual metaphor and visual concretion but an almost abstract delight in language. This last combination is rare: Shakespeare and Keats have it. Take, for example, a phrase from his celebrated story, ‘Odour of Chrysanthemums’ (1911): a miner lies ...”

“... state in May, as he has threatened, he will fit the final piece into the jigsaw that the European powers made of the Eastern Arab world when Britain dismantled the Ottoman Empire. He will become, like his fellow mourners, a head of state. No longer a supplicant at their table, he can be a capo among capi. Is that what Arafat wanted all along, to sit at the ...”