“... played no more than a passively expectant role: the Communist Party at large, which paid the price of existence for it, knew nothing of the affair. The plot took Sukarno by surprise: but it was his rescuer Suharto and not his kidnappers who broke him, by tarring him with the same brush. In the USSR, the Communist Party had become so ineffectual an ...”

“... well​ did Willie and Oscar know each other anyway? In the two massive Lives of Wilde, by Richard Ellmann and Matthew Sturgis, Hornung’s name is not mentioned once. Nor is there a single letter to or from Hornung in the equally massive Complete Letters, edited by Wilde’s grandson, Merlin Holland, and Rupert Hart-Davis. Rowland has a whole chapter ...”

“... available in light of the medical knowledge at the time.’ These claims were not true.In​ 1970, Richard Titmuss celebrated Britain’s tradition of voluntary blood donation in The Gift Relationship, warning that paid-for blood carried a greater risk of contamination. But while it was true that most ‘whole blood’ in the UK came from volunteers, blood ...”

“... He could now implement the reductions in public spending, hikes in interest rates, scrapping of price controls and cuts in real wages that international confidence required. A financial scandal in his team, forcing him to resign in 1982, saved him from continuing association with the military junta when elections were held the following year. Creating his ...”

“... own ambiguous shapeshifting gift; the poem ends, chillingly enough, with a question: ‘What the price is, who can say?’ His loathing for the whole sham business of mesmerism and clairvoyance and spiritualism constituted one of the very few points of angry difference with Elizabeth, and it is difficult to resist the thought that he saw in their varieties ...”

“... retail gallery with three beautifully folded sweaters on a plain table, daring you to search for a price tag.In the fugue of London walking, real feet on unreal ground, we have to deal with that sense of groundlessness, striding faster and faster in anticipation of a bigger fall, weaving hard to avoid the committed, heads-down texters and tweeters who seem to ...”

“... economic growth, with businesses unable to obtain the loans that they need at an acceptable price. Yes to all that. Because the banking bill is still in Parliament, the government has said that there is time for it to incorporate some of the commission’s recommendations. As things currently stand, the main components of the banking bill come from the ...”

“... businesses, all of which were major corporate donors to the Trump campaign and inauguration. The price of their stocks has soared in the last two years. The largest of them, Geo Group, which imprisons one third of the more than 300,000 immigrant detainees, held its 2017 annual conference at the Trump National Doral Golf Club in Miami.)To pay for the ...”

“... and more and more: the evidence of erotic excess. Bayley alluded to this excess in his memoirs; Richard Eyre’s film Iris (2001) offers a sliver. But neither gives anything like an adequate sense of the scale of it, and it is impossible to do so here. Not even Conradi himself can quite manage it: his six hundred or so pages are too few for what he has to ...”

“... the drink, is here supplied by mental illness (‘No less than 12 nervous breakdowns’, ‘the price he had to pay’). There is no doubt that Milligan was very funny and inspired, particularly in the Q5 TV programmes he did in the 1970s, though his verbal dexterities I found less engaging and with unfortunate effects on some of his disciples, e.g. John ...”

“... Diop drew a community of black intellectuals, including African Americans like Langston Hughes and Richard Wright, to the offices of Présence Africaine. Andrade was working with Césaire on a new edition of his long poem Cahier d’un retour au pays natal and compiling an anthology of African poetry. In 1956 Diop organised the first Congress of Black Writers ...”

“... whose splen did Mystical Bedlam used the casebooks of the astrological physician and divine Richard Napier to illuminate the mental world of the 17th century, and to suggest that mental alienation and distress might then have been dealt with in surprisingly sympathetic ways, joined in the chorus of condemnation of the ‘medical brutality’ which ...”

“... at once. When Colin Powell visited Bashar Assad after the conquest of Baghdad it was to name the price of Baathism’s survival in Syria: ending support for Hizbollah in Lebanon, closing the Damascus offices of Palestinian guerrilla organisations and deporting their leaders. He told President Assad not to allow Palestinian spokesmen in Syria to speak to ...”

“... but the idyll is deceptive as once, at least, the river has seen slaughter. It was in 1388 that Richard II’s favourite, Robert Vere, led his army floundering along this flooded valley, desperate to escape his baronial pursuers, who eventually caught up and cut most of them down a little upstream at Radcot Bridge.15 February. R. and I go down to Leicester ...”

“... passers-by to bid for the one item he had for sale – a single, dirty sock. ‘Go on, name your price.’) This is meant to be a gilded age for Brick Lane. Young Bangladeshis have driven away the packs of racists who even in the middle of the 1990s would head there to provoke and maraud. Now all of its four parts are safe for non-whites: the patch nearest ...”