“... front, outside the windscreen, the camera slightly off to the driver’s left. Ray Liotta, looking young and spruce but tired, is at the wheel, his face well lit. Robert de Niro, in the passenger seat, is asleep. Joe Pesci, in the back seat, is nodding off. A thumping noise is heard, and Liotta says, ‘Jimmy.’ De Niro wakes up. Liotta continues: ‘Did I ...”

“... the white-walled earth kiln ran into technical difficulties with her presentation. Karen Russo, a young Israeli artist, had developed a fascination with William Lyttle, the so-called ‘Mole Man’ of Hackney. Lyttle, talked up by estate agents promoting the auction of the ruined shell of his former house, a gothic property wedged like a ghost ship in the ...”

“... them with concern – was recognisably the same person of whom Jim Prior complained to Hugo Young in 1981: ‘She hasn’t really got a friend left in the whole cabinet. One reason she has no friend is that she subjects everyone to the most emotionally exhausting arguments; the other is that she still interrupts everyone all the time. It makes us all ...”

“... sitting by the fire during the damp Irish nights, he liked to tell us boys – my sister was too young to listen – anecdotes about Parnell, whom he admired; and tales of junks and pirates, in which he escaped from brigands or captured prizes. Such images were too vivid to last, their over-bright tints fading into the dimness of nursery-stories that ...”

“... in 1942. When Iseult finally rejected him in the summer of 1917, he decided to propose to a young Englishwoman, Georgie Hyde-Lees. He wrote to Lady Gregory: ‘I certainly feel very tired & have a great longing for order, for routine & shall be content if I find a friendly serviceable woman. I merely know – we had our talk alone two years ago – that ...”

“... Mistress, in whose capacity to read and write, and in her willingness to teach them both to a young slave, Douglas begins to discover the instrument both of freedom and revenge. Fear of domination for Hawthorne resides in the spectre of homosexual rape carried out by an older man – specifically, a domineering uncle-guardian named Robert Manning, whose ...”

“... spontaneously delivered out side 10 Downing Street on her election in 1979: the prayer of St Francis of Assisi, beginning: ‘Where there is discord, may we bring harmony’ – a sentiment which many have found an ironic epigraph for her premiership. This kind of preparation became her standard procedure, for spontaneous asides as well as big ...”

“... of river and two gas stations, nothing you could call a town, had nonetheless caused two groups of young men to come into proximity – one shirtless and black and drinking beer, the other shirtless and white and selling Confederate flag patches and 9/11 keepsakes. We filled the tank at a station frequented exclusively by black customers, and looked across a ...”

“... more remote than ever. After Carrington resigned he was briefly succeeded at the Foreign Office by Francis Pym, until Thatcher won her crushing victory in the 1983 election and replaced him with Geoffrey Howe. He stayed for six years until he was kicked sideways and then, in his quietly devastating resignation speech in November 1990, precipitated Thatcher’s ...”

“... is, transported to Australia. Oliver’s role was exposed by the Leeds Mercury, and retold by Sir Francis Burdett in the House of Commons (Sidmouth ‘abused Oliver for a great fool for being detected’), but the operation was another successful exercise in sending shivers down the spines of the respectable classes and in justifying further acts of ...”

“... pride. As the Irish nation wallowed in its ‘liberation’, a Jesuit priest called Father Francis Shaw submitted an essay to the Jesuit journal Studies which contained what Roy Foster calls a ‘swingeing exposé of lacunae in [Patrick] Pearse’s ideology’. The piece was not published for six years. The editors felt that Ireland was not ready for a ...”

“... the Malayalam inscription on a stone commemorating a 17th-century Jesuit bishop, Archbishop Francis Roz. The church is of the branch of St Thomas Christians which accepted the Roman liturgy introduced by the Portuguese; the ‘Jacobites’, who clung to the old Syrian rites, have a separate church in town. ‘We are loyal to Rome,’ he says ...”

“... and precise, must have seemed utterly counterintuitive, appearing as it did only five years after Francis Fukuyama’s ‘The End of History’. Fukuyama argued with a seductive confidence that liberal democracy was here to stay, that in this sense the great struggles of human history had come to an end. Oh no, they haven’t, Luttwak retorted.According to ...”

“... his MA, and soon left for the Continent, where he appears to have acted as tutor to a wealthy young man. (On the other hand he may have entered his brother-in-law Edmund Popple’s trading-house.) When he returned to England in 1647 his political sympathies were apparently royalist. Though he was soon to change his views, the best readings of his poetry ...”

“... read at West Point, profiled by Lawrence Wright in the New Yorker, heralded by Newsweek as the ‘Francis Fukuyama of al-Qaida’ and by CNN as ‘the most dangerous terrorist you’ve never heard of’. The ‘architect of global jihad’ seems to have been discovered by the umma and the Great Satan at roughly the same time. Lia, a Norwegian scholar of ...”