“... sent to Oxford to acquire British accents and a pseudo-patrician indifference to book-keeping, David Niven Oriental-style. In Mori’s time a middle-rank Foreign Ministry official was caught using secret funds to keep a string of racehorses, yachts and a mistress in a smart apartment – outraging Japanese voters worried about their jobs. Scandal followed ...”

“... Neither the conventional ‘winners’ nor the stereotypical ‘losers’, they play a part in the grand political story which, though crucial, is often overlooked. Cohen was born in 1961 into a National Religious family; his father was of Jewish Afghan origin, his mother of Jewish Polish descent. As a teenager he lived in a settlement in the West Bank. He ...”

“... stores’, thrilling to every element: the delicate chairs, perfumed air, grand stairways, mahogany vitrines. Finding work as a stock boy at Jordan Marsh, the city’s largest department store, made his trade school ‘prison’ bearable. Assigned to the ready-to-wear department, he gravitated towards the ‘better dresses, furs and ...”

“... he became arrogant; he began to drink and, according to a hostile witness, he shared a bed with David Rizzio, his wife’s confidential secretary. Bisexuality, or rumours of it, might have been all the rage in France; its popularity did not extend to Scotland.Darnley did not help by having syphilis. Once he had been murdered, at the age of 21, Mary began ...”

“... Egyptian hosts). My own rather forlorn experience with Sartre was a very minor episode in a very grand life, but it is worth recalling both for its ironies and for its poignancy.It was early in January 1979, and I was at home in New York preparing for one of my classes. The doorbell announced the delivery of a telegram and as I tore it open I noticed with ...”

“... which he exercises over their Counsels.’ Olcott made contact with a young Buddhist called Don David Hewavitarane, who took the name Anagarika Dharmapala (‘homeless protector of the Dharma’). Dharmapala’s status in Sri Lanka today is comparable with Gandhi’s in India, but though they were of the same generation, Dharmapala’s anti-Western ideas ...”

“... By 28 March he was in Belfast: ‘Rode gloriously – splendid steed. Huge – told of many – “Grand”.’ Like many Edwardian men of his class he was, or at least these diaries say that he was, having a whale of a time. The above entries are merely a small sample. We are asked to believe by those who say that these diaries were not forged that Casement ...”

“... of the kind I’d seen alongside the Liffey in the Celtic Tiger dreamtime of Dublin, and outside a grand new gallery in Middlesbrough, with vast screens, mid-square, sited to supply witness to coming Olympic triumphs. Beyond the Legoland estates of Thamesmead, rising on the destruction of previous utopias, and the gently ruffled lake with its surrounding ...”

“... that before being sworn in he had himself anointed with cooking oil in the biblical manner of King David. Ashcroft chose Carl Esbeck, who had directed the Center for Law and Religious Freedom run by the conservative Virginia-based Christian Legal Society, as the first chief of the department’s faith-based office. He named Eric Treene, former litigation ...”

“... between Sybille Bedford’s thirty-year-old life of Aldous and the awaited definitive biography by David Bradshaw. With the passing of time, Murray can tell us things prohibited to his predecessor by discretion and the libel laws. At the same time, like Murray’s other biographies, this one holds the central ground of its subject very ably and maintains a ...”

“... government and security officials overseas and in the UK – among them, Assistant Commissioner David Veness, head of Specialist Operations for the Metropolitan Police, the officer in overall operational charge of countering terror in the United Kingdom. Dr Ranstorp is an expert on Hizbollah, and books such as Palestinian Hamas, Defiant Patriot, The Kidnap ...”

“... out, or sidling into some bastardly digression ...’ Any ‘straight lines’ of descent the grand schematist might be tempted to draw between, say The Epic of Gilgamesh and The Bonfire of the Vanities seem unlikely to trace a true genealogy, and we need the ‘bastardly digressions’ to do justice to what actually happened. The mildest of ...”

“... fallen below an established standard of care, calls not only for judgment but for information on a grand scale. It is to these and similar ends that experts enter the witness box in medical negligence actions. There may anyway be a need for specialist evidence about the plaintiff’s condition and prognosis in order that damages can be assessed; and there may ...”

“... Ursula’s life resembles John Aspinall’s in certain respects. Each is an eccentric. Each is a grand or smart person, of an equivocal kind. Each of these narratives has a Douglas-Home, and there are some similar fatalities. Aspinall is the son of parted parents, a ‘pseudo-orphan’ who rapidly became larger than life. He is by far the more convivial ...”