“... The table is full, the wall is painted, the space is filled with voices!’ Zurab was talking. We were in a Mexican-Japanese restaurant in Tbilisi, ending a heavy night. Bottles and dishes crowded the table; the diners were even gaudier than the décor; over the blast of the band came the voice of Georgia’s richest brewer yelling at his bodyguards ...”

“... is propped against a bookshelf. Dressed in riot gear and bunched together, they are hugging the wall of a mudbrick house ready to kick in the door. On the small coffee table next to my seat is a draft of an article entitled: ‘Should Hizbollah be next?’ With something of the air of the maître-penseur, Dr Ranstorp pulls on a cigarette. ‘Surveillance in ...”

“... in a mirror?) and continued by the men reflected in what is undoubtedly a mirror on the opposite wall. There is a tendency to discuss these pictures as documentary. Thomas Kennedy writes in the Tate catalogue that Sickert is offering ‘realistic representations of people who visited music halls … His works show how people unconsciously engage with the ...”

“... in North of Boston, are full of wise saws – ‘Something there is that doesn’t love a wall,’ ‘Good fences make good neighbours’ and so on – but even though readers might sometimes catch themselves thinking ‘Damn, there goes an epigram,’ the poems also put the proverbial or the homespun phrase under pressure. In ‘The Death of the ...”

“... a 13-year-old Native American girl who died around 1800. Sometimes she appeared as a shadow on the wall. Chester noted her words: ‘A spirit I’ve seen before – a young man, very jolly, very happy – medium height, straight, good deal of energy – controlled movements, energy of nerves. Face a little to the long, chin and jaw firm but not heavy; chin ...”

“... I went off the rails and didn’t care about myself. On one occasion I drove a car through a brick wall.’ In the mid-1990s, Gary’s life was saved by new antiretroviral treatments. He had also been infected with hepatitis C, however, and both conditions continued to undermine his health. Contaminated blood products, he said, had ‘ruined his life’.Colin ...”

“... Best Writers (2016), Joel Whitney suggested that among those Matthiessen was surveilling was Richard Wright, who was living in Paris after breaking with the Communist Party in 1944.Richardson does not rule out Wright as an initial target, but working from Matthiessen’s unpublished accounts of his CIA work, one of which is called ‘THE PARIS REVIEW ...”

“... ascendancy of the machine. ‘Once I slangily asked her how “she cranked up” to do a scene,’ Richard Meryman, who interviewed her for Life, reported. ‘“I don’t crank anything,” she replied: “I’m not a Model T … An actor is not a machine, no matter how much they want to say you are.”’ By the time Arthur Miller met her, the rift Steffens ...”

“... from the shadowy Saudi arms trader Adnan Khashoggi. Trump threatened to sue a journalist at the Wall Street Journal for accurately reporting his collapse, one of his many attempts to intimidate the press, and another technique he learned from Roy Cohn.‘Wa-a-a-a-h! – Little Donald, Unhappy At Last – Trump’s Final Days,’ crowed the cover story in ...”

“... but also to educate them in new musical trends, and major works by Stravinsky, Schoenberg and Richard Strauss were premiered at the Proms before the First World War. But in the beginning, Wood’s programmes were much less demanding, often consisting of many short items, so as not to bore the audience. This was especially true of the early final ...”

“... rivers, and employing vast amounts of slave labour in gigantic public works projects (the Great Wall). The despot above and the cringing mass below prevented the emergence of anything resembling a modern middle class. Karl Wittfogel, the leading ideologue of the German Communist Party in the early 1930s, was the leading proponent of this theory. He went to ...”

“... for families to sleep in, survive on sufferance. Most stand in a state of near destruction, a wall down here, doors falling from hinges there, prisoners shaved for execution. Posterity can lay the blame on Syria’s modern rulers: the French, who between 1920 and 1946 cleared acres of labyrinthine quarters to make room for cannon and tanks to control the ...”

“... an eye, And fly-leaf ballads on the vendor’s string, And broad-edge bold-print posters by the wall. He took such cognisance of men and things, If any beat a horse, you felt he saw; If any cursed a woman, he took note.That manages to be heroic and quotidian at the same time, describing at once a vocation in life and a stroll about town: how brilliantly ...”

“... the best picture The Taking of Christ on loan from Dublin, a superb painting but hung on the same wall as the National Gallery’s Supper at Emmaus. This is nowhere near as good because the central figures don’t compare. In the Dublin picture Christ with his downcast eyes is ascetic and noble (with Judas yearning and troubled). In the NG’s picture ...”

“... the ones that penetrated the hull, were by intellectual formidables such as the critic and editor Richard Poirier, who methodically dismantled Bellow in this paper (after a patronising observation from Atlas about Bellow’s unsure footing when he ventures into ‘the realm of ideas’, Poirier dryly commented: ‘Atlas himself occasionally ventures into the ...”