“... Iread​ Peter Biskind’s book about the New Hollywood, Easy Riders, Raging Bulls, long ago. Apart from scraps of celebrity anecdote, what I remember of it now is something more diffuse, a mood associated with the mysterious figures of the producers: an impression of flared trousers and shirts with the two top buttons undone, collar points two feet apart, of tanned white skin, gold, nice teeth, the smell of tobacco and aftershave and deodorant, of men outwardly confident, hungry, vain, bullying, concupiscent and covetous, but also charming, garrulous, fascinating, prone to infatuations with strangers and their stories, flitting from one intense interest to another, even as they held on stubbornly to ideas for years until the money and the creatives could be married and a film born ...”

“... As it fell out, many of the Civil Rights leaders who worked closely with Martin Luther King had been trained by Niebuhr’s students, or were conversant with his thinking. King’s great ‘Letter from Birmingham City Jail’ would mention Niebuhr as a source of the precept that ‘groups tend to be more immoral ...”

“... Nothing was worth saving, and Wisner began to build a new network. Then, on 23 August 1944, King Michael of Romania ended his alliance with Germany.Wisner was ordered to Bucharest to ‘establish the intentions of the Soviet Union regarding Romania’. An advance party of nine agents had been sent ahead of him, including Beverly Bowie, who achieved the ...”

“... Jubilee Session. No other reigning sovereign had visited the principal university buildings since King Edward VII opened them in 1905. Six months before the Queen’s visit, the Vice-Chancellor, Professor J.M. Whittaker, put to his recently-appointed Professor of English Literature a ‘general idea’ – to celebrate the Queen’s visit by reviving the ...”

“... The Trump spectacle often ends with insult imitating satire.)Fred Trump, Donald’s father, was a king of Queens; the Donald became a joker in Manhattan. In search of fame and greater fortune in the big city, he set out from the family mansion with its 23 rooms, nine bathrooms and, at the front, four white columns adorned with a confected family crest. A ...”

“... with a bottle of bright pink cough mixture always at hand’), put it to Peter Wildeblood, one of the co-defendants, that his lover Edward McNally was ‘infinitely his social inferior’, as though this social miscegenation were as much an offence as the act of buggery itself. ‘Nobody ever flung it at me during the war that I was ...”

“... I left the village where I’d spent the night, the village where, in the ninth century, a famous king had beaten the army of a northern warlord. I climbed a steep path to a high plateau and walked along dusty tracks. There was gunfire in the distance. In the early afternoon I rested on a hilltop, on the ramparts of ancient fortifications whose shape was ...”

“... Six Gallery was hardly virgin territory. The space had once been a community art venture called King Ubu, operated by the Black Mountain poet Robert Duncan and his collagist partner Jess Collins. Duncan, removing his clothes at the conclusion of his verse play Faust Foutu, in order to demonstrate the meaning of nakedness, anticipated by a decade or so the ...”

“... trenchant objections to Tolstoy was that he had failed to understand the function of the Fool in King Lear. The Fool is ‘integral’ to the play, Orwell insisted, both as chorus and as a ‘foil to Lear’s frenzies’ (which are, as he points out, frenzies of renunciation). Peter Davison, general editor of the 20-volume ...”

“... Mendelssohn, you must work against the music’s almost fatal facility, its deceptive smoothness. Peter Pears was a wonderful singer because of, not despite, the peculiarity of his voice. Stylistic genre had nothing to do with it: the musical spirit was as likely to manifest itself in Julius Patzak singing Die Fledermaus or in a song by Gershwin or the ...”

“... pre-conference skirmishers were all on the left. The hardly well-kept secret leaked out that Peter Mokaba, the fiery head of the youth section, had had a career as a police informer. Mokaba has become so prominent that it would be embarrassing for the ANC leadership to admit to this, so we suddenly found him cropping up at Mandela’s side to welcome ...”

“... of Charles I to Henrietta Maria. In a recent essay (published in Past and Present, November 1983) Peter White has thrown the Tyacke thesis into question. He contends (as H.C. Porter has long done) that the pre-Laudian Church was never narrowly Calvinist. Yet at least White and Tyacke can find common ground in their emphasis on the 1620s: a decade which Hugh ...”

“... he told me, I just believed him, because he believed in himself to the fullest,’ Zelma told Peter Guralnick. In the summer of 1962, a month before his 21st birthday, Redding got his big break. On 14 August or thereabouts (accounts vary), he drove Jenkins to Memphis to record at Stax and persuaded the studio’s founder, Jim Stewart, to let him sing a ...”

“... to teenagers across the country (at almost the same time, Michael Gove was sending copies of the King James Bible, with a foreword by himself, to every school in England). The government also passed a law allowing it to appoint judges even if the opposition disagreed, and seven judges loyal to Fidesz duly joined the Constitutional Court. Orbán called this ...”

“... to having everything for free. What to do? Eventually, Andrew Lownie records, they were lent King Hussein of Jordan’s seven-bedroomed Castlewood House on the edge of Windsor Great Park. ‘Bored, Sarah started 1987 with three weeks at Sandringham, followed by a fortnight skiing in Klosters, and a ten-day break with Andrew in Barbados paid for by the ...”