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“... Sittenfeld wrote a hyperbolic essay for Salon.com that set out the paradox of her contempt for George Bush (whose policies she regarded as ‘misguided and perhaps evil’) and her love for Laura Bush: ‘There is no public figure I admire more.’ She attributed her readiness ‘to share my love for Laura with the world’ to Ann Gerhart’s biography The ...”

“... The best bits of Blown away are the words of an impressive range of Stones people, from a louche Andrew Oldham to a superbly articulate Marianne Faithfull. Another Hotchner inadequacy – no new interviews or cooperation from the present band members themselves – again works in his favour. Here the over-familiar Stones story is retold from the outside, yet ...”

“... a profitable excursion into business, and finally six tumultuous years heading the Pentagon under George W. Bush. Oddly, Rumsfeld begins his memoir with an out-of-sequence account of his 1983 meeting with Saddam Hussein as Reagan’s Middle East envoy, infamous for the evident warmth with which the two greeted each other. Perhaps it is there because he always ...”

“... he uses, as here, in his short poem (a free version of the Latin poem by Arthur Johnston) about St Andrew’s, where he has lived with his family and worked for more than twenty years: I love how it comes right out of the blue North Sea edge, sunstruck with oystercatchers. A bullseye centred at the outer reaches, A haar of kirks, one inch in front of ...”

“... subordinate, to resist the guidance he was getting from his immediate superior in Baghdad, General George Casey, whose own views mirrored those of the JCS. None of this would have amounted to much had it not been for the result of the November 2006 elections. When the Democrats took control of Congress, Bush was jolted into realising that his control of ...”

“... George Michael​ died at the age of 53 on Christmas Day 2016; despite his success, it was hard not to think of what might have been. He was born Georgios Kyriacos Panayiotou on 25 June 1963 in East Finchley, London, to Jack Panos – a Greek Cypriot restaurant owner who had anglicised his name – and his English wife, Lesley Harrison ...”

“... The much gossiped about George Eliot absolutely hated the idea of people talking behind their hands. The year she took up with a married man was also the year Ruskin’s wife revealed her husband’s impotence during court proceedings. ‘Gossip is a sort of smoke that comes from the dirty tobacco-pipes of those who diffuse it,’ Eliot wrote ironically in Daniel Deronda ...”

“... wander onto the wrong side of the law, and get in trouble with ‘the Bill’. Indeed, both George Cole and Dennis Waterman in their Minder roles are now thought suitable characters to help encourage young people to stay off drugs in a series of commercials sponsored by the DHSS. The thought of dear old Arthur ending up inside for some of his misdeeds ...”

“... Protesters in Minneapolis on the morning of 29 May, three days after local police murdered George Floyd, were monitored by a Reaper drone deployed by US Customs and Border Protection, circling four miles above the city. News of the deployment elicited widespread alarm; a letter signed by several senior members of Congress condemned the use of ‘live ...”

“... last, but Jean did secure two long interviews with the man himself, and she told the young editors George Plimpton and Robert Silvers that she would give the interview to the Paris Review, so long as they made her an associate editor. They took the material (Number 12 in their famous series ‘The Art of Fiction’) and Stein got her place on the masthead, but ...”

“... way, they devised new plans and insisted that more force would do the trick. By 1989, when George H.W. Bush became president, the United States had developed robust capabilities for projecting power into the wider Middle East. Yet Central Command’s mission had become fuzzy. External threats to the Persian Gulf – symbolised by the Soviet military ...”

“... but now I think, emphatically, that he was right. In fact, it isn’t possible to come away from Andrew Adonis’s crisp and affectionate Life with any other impression. Adonis is naturally more light-footed than Alan Bullock was in his three-volume masterwork on Bevin (Bullock only allotted Hitler a single, though memorable, volume), but the picture he ...”

“... Macedonia (where he served in the Royal Army Medical Corps), Grieve tells his old schoolteacher, George Ogilvie, about his detailed plans for a hundred essays on Scottish Art and the Scottish Church. He is planning a Scottish Vortex, and is already fizzing with that energy which would make him a power-surge at the end of the Celtic Twilight: ‘I can think ...”

“... was hunting. ‘I have been trying to hunt three days a week,’ he wrote his friend and publisher George Smith. ‘I find it must be only two. Mortal man cannot write novels, do the Post Office, and go out three days.’ ‘In some coming perfect world,’ he said on another occasion, ‘there will be hunting 12 months in the year.’ An acquaintance once ...”

“... and jump off the jetty during games of Journey To The Bottom Of The Sea. He wants to be George Best, is always on the look-out for horrible ways to die, and has vivid explanations for everything: Some of us weren’t allowed to swim down at die seafront. If you cut your toe on a rock you’d get polio. A boy from Barrytown ...”