“... to help her, and they started recording the music that would become her first album, To Whom It May Concern.Their next home, in Hidden Hills, California, was a rustic idyll, with fruit trees, horses, goats, chickens and peacocks, a 600-year-old oak tree with a swing. Riley and Ben spent their days ‘crashing bikes and running off finding snakes and getting ...”

“... symbolism could not be clearer: the army belongs at the heart of the country. Civilian politicians may play whatever games they wish, but only in the designated government compound.The political dominance of Pakistan’s armed forces is a well-established fact. At their worst (three stints of military dictatorship since 1958), the country’s politics have ...”

“... too busy, too grandiose, too much craning your neck. The best way to view a grand painted ceiling may be from a beanbag such as those now placed on the floor of the Banqueting House in Whitehall, into which visitors can sink while gazing up at the enormous panels Rubens painted for Charles I. Hardie shows how these ceiling paintings reworked classical images ...”

“... campaign team and [the] Kremlin’ – evidence that the dossier glaringly failed to provide.In May 2017, Robert Mueller, the former head of the FBI, was appointed special counsel to oversee the official investigation into Russia’s alleged interference in the 2016 election. After nearly two years of exhaustive research, the Mueller Report found no ...”

“... restitution?’ Anne Wetsi Mpoma, a Congolese gallerist based in Brussels, argues that provenance may even be an obstacle to restitution. It’s easy to imagine an artefact stranded in limbo as scholars rummage in the archive hoping to discover how it made its way to Belgium 150 years ago. Near the end of his life, dogged by criticism of the Free ...”

“... motive for lethal Kennedy-hatred among disaffected CIA and Mafia types, insofar as the two species may be distinguished. The explanation turns out to be relatively simple, and consistent with the known facts. Kennedy was waiting to hear that Castro had been assassinated in Havana. When he didn’t hear, he calmly betrayed the mercenary force as the laws of ...”

“... the bonus which distinguishes celebrity from fame? It depends on how you define perversion. There may be a link between shame and celebrity, but we know that there is a link between perversion and shame. Shame, or shaming, with its ostentatious morality, might be seen as a form of perversion in itself. Celebrity is often a ritual of public humiliation. Not ...”

“... It is a long-standing custom that no two ships in the Royal Navy, or in the British Merchant Navy, may have the same name. And so it was with SS Montrase. It became the Forfar, no doubt – according to a recent informant in Liverpool – because some wag at the Admiralty was in the habit of doing the football pools. Or he ...”

“... time when talk of such things can seem fuelled only by machismo, vanity and vicious buffoonery. He may have been mistaken in his self-watching (though he’s more honest a writer than most) and mad with ambition, but it might also be said that he has kept watch over the Republic in ways too various, and too arresting, to be summarily dismissed. He has now, in ...”

“... look spineless in the face of Serb and Croat terror, has produced a subsidiary institution which may be the most important legacy of the war. In one way this is history repeating itself, for in 1945 it was US pressure that led to the creation of the International Military Tribunal which sat at Nuremberg. During the Yalta Conference, Stalin proposed a toast ...”

“... years on) with the disruptions licensed by Modernism. His breakthrough to imaginative freedom may have exacerbated this by ‘opening up’ the possibility of an absolute reversion to Romanticism. For all its lovely accomplishment a text such as ‘Squarings’ xl is a shorthand Wordsworthian sonnet about ‘being’ and starlight.Heaney nonchalantly ...”

“... office on 3 September proved to be, in Hunt’s words, a ‘dry hole’. Some months later, on 3 May 1972, on the orders of Colson, the White House arranged to fly some Cuban-American veterans of the Bay of Pigs to Washington from Miami. They were told that Ellsberg (now released on bail) would be attending an anti-war rally on the steps of the Capitol and ...”

“... I had to put money on it, I’d say that the odds on quick success in destroying the Iraqi regime may be as high as 5/1 or more, given US military superiority, the vile nature of Saddam Hussein’s rule, the unreliability of Baghdad’s missiles, and the deep divisions in the Arab world. But at first sight, the longer-term gains for the US look pretty ...”

“... minister in Paris at the time, ‘and should be imprisoned in the interior of the Republic. May he never see Saint-Domingue again.’ ‘You cannot hold Toussaint far enough from the ocean or put him in a prison that is too strong,’ Leclerc reiterated a month later. He seemed to fear that the deported man might suddenly reappear. His very presence in ...”

“... them from one town to another’ and tells us that ‘although the name of a place or enterprise may exist and may seem likely as a venue, that particular name probably does not represent the actual name of the place or enterprise depicted in this book.’ Just to add to the amiable sense of dislocation, he assures us that ...”