“... Didn’t make a damn bit of difference there in the end. Probably won’t do here, either. We had Bob Hope there, of course. We were lucky, we didn’t have Jesse Jackson like we’re gonna have here.’ I asked how the funding worked. ‘Well, Washington has this idea that democracy is something you can sorta buy. They say: will it be free and fair? If we ...”

“... our knowledge!) and that tonight will feature metal detectors, iris scans and hologram IDs. Fine, fine, fine. After all, we’re going to have our official pictures taken with HER: who wouldn’t want to be safe? Sad to get wasted even as one stands leering hysterically at the ...”

“... the family’s contribution to the Russo-Swedish War). She went to study at the Royal Academy of Fine Arts in Stockholm in 1882 and after graduating exhibited several times a year in group shows in Stockholm. She was from a wealthy family and didn’t really need to make money from her art, though she did illustrate some children’s books and sell some ...”

“... near mathematically concise French. The author of a biography of Breton, a short book on Bob Dylan’s Highway 61 Revisited, and a translator of Echenoz, among others, Polizzotti has a knack for finding pleasingly demotic versions of Roussel’s compressed syntax: ‘la coloration imagée’ becomes ‘vivid tints’; ‘apparitions sans ...”

“... is so; ‘there is a levelling impulse at work.’ ‘Margot laughed in spite of herself’ and ‘Bob Sneed broke the silence’ are not only dead sentences but an unprovoked pain to all good writers. The fact that Harris, like many others, goes in for the occasional ‘fugitive poeticism’ only makes things worse. When he says that something is ‘truly of ...”

“... ticket ever registered any kind of pulse, we would probably not have been spared any of these fine initiatives. And, since Morris was once caught sharing his White House poll data with Bob Dole’s office, perhaps the ‘triangulation’ even went that far. Like other consultants, I am often called a mercenary, which ...”

“... in the conspiracy and was given a six-month suspended sentence (which was converted into a €6840 fine). He continues to write for a daily newspaper. Other journalists got less support from Berlusconi. Carlo Bonini and Giuseppe d’Avanzo of La Repubblica, who broke some of the Abu Omar story, were trailed by agents and had their phones tapped. In August ...”

“... pink roses pinned to their lapels. ‘This is like Imelda Marcos arriving in China,’ he said to Bob Colacello, who travelled with him. Warhol holed up in his orange-on-orange room at the Hilton, eating buckets of Imperial Gold caviar and complaining that international calls had to be booked in advance. When he was finally coaxed out, he went to see the ...”

“... Chapman brothers’ polymorphous perverse tableaux of mannequins are much like Paul MacCarthy’s; Bob Flanagan and Sheree Rose make Gillian Wearing’s videos look rather sweet and innocent; LA ‘pathetic art’ is alive and feebly kicking in London; Hadrian Pigott’s instrument case inevitably calls to mind Michele Rollman’s instrument case; Lyle Ashton ...”

“... after she had achieved publication, problems remained. In a letter written to her close friend Bob Smith (who published the first appreciative essay on her novels) Barbara Pym lightly passes on the information from Cape that ‘8 Americans and 10 Continental publishers saw and “declined” ... Excellent Women and they are still plodding on with [Jane and ...”

“... joke about academic life: ‘Why are the disputes so poisonous? Because the stakes are so low.’ Bob Woodward’s new book about the first year of the Trump administration raises some of these thorny issues, but it turns them on their head. No one could doubt that having Trump in the White House is an existential matter: the president’s decisions have the ...”

“... independence from France in 1975, the Comoros has seen twenty coups. Behind many of them was Bob Denard, a French mercenary and collector of world religions (he tried three: Catholicism, Judaism and Islam) and wives (eight), who inspired Frederick Forsyth’s novel Dogs of War. He was a modern corsair, he told the New York Times, but instead of receiving ...”

“... right out of Spencer, Indiana, went to Paris, France, married Maurice Macmillan, and moved into a fine house in London, England. She not only settled in England but settled for it, thoroughly Anglicising both herself and her ambitions for her new family. But it was still the old formula – rubber and iron – which governed the upbringing of her three ...”

“... with a repressed boy who murders his mother. The stage is beautiful. We have raided the chapel for fine Anglican velvets and old wood tables with gravitas. He tries to conform, enrolling after he leaves school for a degree in commerce at a university in the Transkei, one of South Africa’s black homelands. Once there he begins to unravel. He spends his days ...”

“... popular representations of capital punishment, without being either patronising or sentimental. A fine early chapter plots the shift over the 17th and 18th centuries, from depictions of ‘martyrdom’ to ‘moral speeches’, and analyses the ambiguity of folk songs about the condemned, while in later chapters Evans deals extensively with sensationalist ...”