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“... 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 ...”

“... Albert Camus​ hated travelling. ‘Fear is the price of travel,’ he wrote in his journal of an unhappy trip through Central Europe in the summer of 1935, where he found himself gripped by ‘an instinctive desire to regain the shelter of old habits’. For Camus, who had tuberculosis, travel abroad raised the prospect not only of psychic unease but of illness: ‘We are feverish but porous ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... profit. For members of his Mar-a-Lago Golf Resort, for which he levies a $100,000 entry fee, the price was $525 a ticket (guests at the hotel paid extra). For that they got to mingle with celebrities like Sylvester Stallone, who turned down Trump’s offer to become chairman of the National Endowment for the Arts, and Joe ‘Morning Joe’ Scarborough, the ...”

“... that built-in shrug characteristic of Eighties Conservatism, electrodes on the testicles a small price to pay when economic recovery’s at stake. They both talk contemptuously of gesture politics as if Lady Thatcher having tea with the General isn’t gesture politics too, the gesture in question being two fingers to humanity. 1 November. Lord Tebbit writes ...”

“... were in the mid 1970s coming to represent a sort of alternative establishment. His antipathy to Richard Branson was partly a matter of distaste for what Virgin represented (a music-first ethos of drift-and-discovery and whimsical eccentricity), but also a creeping fear, once the Pistols had joined the label, that the perpetually grinning Branson, in his ...”

“... rates, which was always one of her prime goals (she told Major that lower interest rates were the price she would extract for ERM membership). But Ridley was gesturing towards the fundamental problem as Thatcher saw it. A Europe supplied with the benefits of German economic management would necessarily be a Europe in which the Germans had too much power. If ...”

“... the same rule of agreement; as Baron says, ‘violating a little grammatical rule was no great price to pay in order to keep the masculine pronoun at the top of the gender hierarchy.’) Second, the generic ‘he’ is a tool of patriarchy. While an indefinite like ‘everyone’ includes people of any gender, even when accompanied by the undeniably ...”

“... In May 2016, Diana Craig Patch, the Met’s curator for Egyptian art, received an email from Richard Semper, a Paris-based dealer, pitching a ‘hard piece I have for sale’. It was Nedjemankh’s coffin: Semper and his partner, Christophe Kunicki, wanted €4.5 million. Kunicki is a fixture in the European art world, fêted by museum curators. He ...”

“... I hate to say it, but it can be very helpful to us. I mean you hear a singer even as brilliant as Richard Tucker and he’s a Jew. HALDEMAN: Is he? NIXON: He’s pushy … HALDEMAN: There are a lot more anti-Semites than there are Jews, and the anti-Semites are with us generally and the Jews sure aren’t. The Breast was a grotesque fable out of Kafka ...”

“... back anti-lynching legislation, claiming it was a matter for the individual states. This was the price he paid for getting them to do his bidding when he needed them. But it made him repugnant to the liberal wing of the party. To them, he reeked of ‘magnolia’. Nonetheless, Johnson believed a brokered convention that could not coalesce around a liberal ...”

“... to spring a trap in our minds. ‘Rural England is where urban England now dumps its rubbish,’ Richard Girling writes. ‘Here it tips everything from garbage in landfills to fridges in ponds, broken cars and surplus people.’1 The Daily Mail says there is a plague of rats in Britain as a result of the lack of care taken in refuse collection. The ...”

“... offered to buy Benjafield’s shares in the newspaper; Benjafield named an absurdly inflated price; the prince paid up. Overnight the Morning Post became an opposition newspaper, and Taylor was promoted from drama critic to editor, though with the politician and dramatist Richard Brinsley Sheridan managing the ...”

“... by Thomas Gainsborough, Joshua Reynolds, Arthur Devis, John Opie, Jonathan Richardson and Richard Cosway, among others. The small, unattributed canvas he disposes of in 1928 is not in the same league. But it does come with an intriguing back story. Most of Henry Howard’s family’s wealth originally came from sugar plantations worked by enslaved ...”