“... with us or against us,’ one attendee texted me. The party was held at a former school in north-east Washington. Police and anti-Musk protesters stood on a square of grass outside. Inside, people wore T-shirts that said ‘Make AI open source again’ and necklaces that read ‘own your data’; one man had a Ron ...”

“... looked as if he was going to burst. He fled to lie on a beach with Arthur somewhere up the north coast of KwaZulu-Natal. I spoke to him there on his mobile phone. He was chortling with the sheer pleasure of getting away. When he was back I asked him about his sister-in-law. Oh, that’s sort of settled down, he said. The police have left her alone so ...”

“... head shining above the water as the sun goes down over drilling rigs beached by the receding North Sea tide. The magazine Management Today has developed a distinctive style of portrait photography in recent years. Here is a constant stream of successful business figures, but here also is a problematic redundancy of appearance: how can one promote the ...”

“... he talked mostly to him, but Princess Margaret didn’t confine herself to John Gielgud and Paul Eddington but to her credit wanted to meet the boys in the play, which she did, though I suspect most of them had no idea who she was. In 1984 Snowdon took pictures of me for (I think) the Sunday Times after the shooting of A Private Function, the most ...”

“... himself. ‘Philosopher, poet and playwright as well as pastor,’ Garton Ash declares, ‘John Paul II is simply the greatest world leader of our times.’ Commensal witness to the planetary vision of the Pontiff – ‘When I once had dinner with him, in a circle of Polish friends, speaking Polish, I was struck by his ... global experience, faith and ...”

“... War in 1982, the Royal Navy, supposedly capable of going head to head with Soviet forces in the North Atlantic, was exposed as lacking the US navy’s multi-layered air defences, and was able to stop its aircraft carriers being sunk only by sacrificing smaller warships. Sometimes the delusion remained untested. During the Cold War, British troops in Germany ...”

“... neo-conservatism – Alan Bloom, Harvey Mansfield, Joseph Epstein, Hilton Kramer, Charles Murray, Paul Craig Roberts, Irving Kristol, even such names for the connoisseur as Richard Cornuelle – they are among the fruits of a mutually beneficial association. For on the one side, there are limits to local supply – the efforts of Conor Cruise O’Brien, ...”

“... early modern period. The Night Battles and The Cheese and the Worms, each a case-study from the north-east corner of Italy, were followed by a synthesis of Eurasian sweep in Ecstasies. The work that has appeared since is no less challenging, but there has been a significant alteration of its forms, and many of its themes. The books of the first twenty years ...”

“... Britain and France as gangsters. What I remember were the things that made us laugh: the column by Paul Jennings that had a tongue-twister about ‘tuskless rustics eating crustless Ruskets’; the strip cartoon by Jules Feiffer; the witty reviews by Kenneth Tynan of plays that we had next to no chance of seeing; the house adverts by the subversive estate ...”

“... a baby was born to a woman who had received a uterus from a deceased donor, a feat repeated in North America last June, giving reproductive hope to trans women who want to carry children of their own. So far, at least, it seems that a womb is still necessary to bring a baby into being, though researchers at the Children’s Hospital of Philadelphia have ...”

“... but, after all, sudden conversions occur. ‘Personally, I would have had the watchers out on St Paul for a long time if I had been in charge of the Christian secret service when he came blundering into Damascus yelling that he’d gone blind, and Christ was the Messiah.’ Railton does his work only too well and on the last page we see one of his younger ...”

“... speeches and an emotional television series called Insurrection, broadcast nightly. But once the North broke and the IRA campaign recommenced, the state’s attitude changed. ‘In an act of astonishing political opportunism,’ O’Loughlin wrote, ‘1916 was revised. By 1976, and the 60th celebrations, a different tune was being played. For people of my ...”

“... Klansmen and neo-Nazis – most of them veterans – drove to the site of a march in Greensboro, North Carolina, where members of the Communist Workers’ Party were protesting against the Klan’s attempt to sabotage their organising of black textile workers. Five of the protesters were killed in a shoot-out; 12 were wounded. The trial that followed ...”

“... CPA fostered.* When the auditors first commented on the CPA’s lack of accountability, its boss, Paul Bremer, bullishly replied that their report ‘does not meet the standards Americans have come to expect of the inspector general’. In his just published memoirs, Bremer dwells on infighting within George Bush’s cabinet and his claim that he tried and ...”

“... the Acts of the Apostles has little to say about any of them except Peter; its main protagonist is Paul, an early apostle but not one of the ‘twelve’). The earliest written source on the subject is to be found in the Apocrypha. This is a class of writings which may not seem the best source for documentary data, though to call an early writing ...”