“... was reticent and barely spoke, but became friends with a fellow student (and fellow photographer), David Armstrong. The camera became a solution to the problems of childhood, of growing up, of what was happening to her now – a way of proving her experiences were real.After leaving Satya, she moved into a flatshare with Armstrong in Boston. Her luminous ...”

“... Leo Amery’s Birmingham, sixty years or so later, empire did not mean a great deal, to judge by David Cannadine’s memoir of his not very imperial childhood which he appends to his new book. Cannadine’s aim is to answer P.D. Morgan’s challenge to envisage the empire as ‘an entire interactive system, one vast interconnected world’. This requires a ...”

“... nexus, in favour of Spartan purity. The unlikely father of the ‘white cube effect’ was Casper David Friedrich, whose studio’s one ornament was a T-square dangling from the wall, a reminder of honest German craftsmanship in keeping with his penchant for woodwork and frame-design. Of course, Friedrich’s brand of mystical pietism was partly responsible ...”

“... number of survivors miraculously trickled back to England. Among them were the ship’s captain, David Cheap; his second-in-command, Robert Baynes; the chief gunner, John Bulkeley; the carpenter, John Cummins; and three young midshipmen, John Byron, Alexander Campbell and Isaac Morris. They returned home in rival groups, by different routes, telling ...”

“... invention filled the political vacuum, at least in England. A regency was rejected; James was held to have abdicated; and the infant James, who should have succeeded his father, was passed over for the crown, on the specious pretence that the baby was a pretender, smuggled into the queen’s apartments in a warming pan. The crown passed instead to William ...”

“... away from the eyes of the international community. The ‘autonomy’ envisaged by the Camp David agreements is unlikely to extend beyond garbage collection. Ostensibly Two Minutes over Baghdad is a True Life Adventure Story in the ‘Entebbe’ tradition, in which an author trades his skills as a publicist against ‘inside’ information supplied by ...”

“... the victim of Mammon and the casualty of market forces. In the days when the Church still held an entrenched place in the fabric of British society, the responsibility for publishing its own biennial Who’s Who was one that rested proudly with the nation’s premier academic publishing-house, the Oxford University Press. Gradually, however, this ...”

“... from Lytle and Orgel, F.W. Kent and Patricia Simons have turned the proceedings of a conference held in Melbourne in 1983 into a valuable volume of essays on patronage in Renaissance Italy. What is particularly interesting about both collections is the fact that they discuss two kinds of patronage and, at least on occasion, the relations between them. The ...”

“... not simply to pass on his sympathies. On 14 February 2017, when Comey still had his job, Trump held a meeting with him in the White House to try to persuade him to drop the FBI investigation into Michael Flynn, who had resigned the day before from his post as national security adviser. Flynn quit following the exposure of his contacts with Ambassador ...”

“... timber than has occupied England’s throne in many decades’ – courtiers and royal-watchers held their breath to see if ‘Bertie’ would make out. In fact, the responsibility thrust upon him brought out unsuspected qualities in George VI, and the institution emerged from the trial stronger in public affection than ever before. The crisis exemplifies ...”

“... be a widow in the next.’ It is a warning that has too often been ignored – and not only by the David Jenkinses and the Spacely-Trellises of today’s Ecclesia Anglicana. For they, too, of course, had their predecessors. The Bishop of London who declared at the outbreak of war in 1914, ‘This is the greatest fight ever made for the Christian Religion – a ...”

“... in the languages of theology, jurisprudence, humanism and philosophy, and may be said to have been held together by a concept of ‘the political’ sufficiently coherent and idiosyncratically Latin and Western to raise the question whether ‘political thought’ can be held to exist in the culture of other civilisations ...”

“... This gap could easily be filled by the ‘social forces of production’, but those forces were held back by the so-called free market. It had become ‘increasingly impossible to manage the economy both for private profit and the needs of society as a whole’. The solution had to be drastic: ‘a massive and irreversible shift of power to working ...”

“... personally. Looking at that close-up now, that impeccably slicked hair and impossibly white grin, held for much longer than it takes to say ‘cheese’, I can see a glimpse of what David Thomson calls Kelly’s ‘harsh, calculating cheerfulness’. It is a picture of an all-American confidence, one that was not just ...”

“... the theatre of a state opening of Parliament, featuring such kenspeckle figures as ‘Sir David Frost arriving to exchange a word with his father-in-law, the Duke of Norfolk and Earl Marshal’, and the Earl Marshal pointing out the patriotic wall paintings to his French guests and saying: ‘Vous voyez? Agincourt. Autre victoire pour nous. Victoire ...”