“... was the long, emotion-charged speech with which, as Israeli Ambassador, he acutely embarrassed Richard Nixon, who ‘sat mute with his eyes averted’. When his term as Chief of Staff was up, Rabin asked for the Washington Embassy, to the acute surprise of those who found it difficult to visualise him as a diplomat and despite the pain it must have caused ...”

“... are concerned with everything from high diplomacy – Q: What do you say if you meet someone like Richard Nixon? A: ‘History will record your true worth’ – to how to patronise new neighbours. Q: ‘How can I be helpful without making them think my house is an extension of their house?’ A: Tell them where the best shops are. They want to know whether ...”

“... in 1764. Woodcut illustrations, scanty before the 19th century, can be found as early as 1681 in Richard Burton’s Historical Remarques. The great age of the London guidebook began, however, in the middle of the 19th century, as David Webb has shown in the London Journal (1980, No 2). One important development illustrates nicely that odd relationship ...”

“... Cold Warriors caught in a time-warp’. But heroic trade-unionism is at one with the ancients, the white carthorse on the steps of Number Ten is dust with Bellerophon, the horse of Alexander. A cruel memory of that age lingers, the TUC trip to Poland at the height of Party-military repression in that country. It was a jaunt which the EEPTU opposed ...”

“... in American Africans in Ghana (2006), visitors or residents included Maya Angelou, Malcolm X, Richard Wright, Martin Luther King, Adam Clayton Powell, George Padmore, C.L.R. James and more. Frantz Fanon wrote much of The Wretched of the Earth in Ghana, and the year before Ali’s visit, W.E.B. DuBois died and was buried in Accra. In February 1964 Cassius ...”

“... with fresh tree stumps. ‘We cut them down,’ a guard says. ‘There was a delegation wearing white suits. They didn’t want to get them dirty.’ When you have a country to rebuild maybe heritage is indulgence. Or maybe it’s something else. Beirut’s architects talk about ‘collective amnesia’: building over unpleasant history is the best way of ...”

“... guests had their heels checked for explosives – this was well before the ‘shoe bomber’ Richard Reid tried to bring down an American Airlines flight from Paris to Miami. The Chadian state used to be – in the words of the American anthropologist Janet Roitman – a ‘garrison-entrepôt’: a guarded storage facility for hoarders in one of the ...”

“... abbreviated quality of Down’s Syndrome … The red, uneven, shining skin had plastic patches of white fat [like] layers of overlapping Parma ham.’ The novel suffers from a surfeit of literary, as well as linguistic, self-consciousness. Characters are continually pelting each other with chunks of Shakespeare or T.S. Eliot. There are even a couple of ...”

“... object of Michael’s affections complains that he’s ‘too dogmatic’, too ‘black and white’), while the tragi-farcical ending collapses the different levels of reality in a surprising and effective way. In The House of Sleep, on the other hand, a kinky, right-wing mad scientist rubs shoulders with more plausible cast members for no particular ...”

“... more of an activity and less of a product,’ a shift that aligned him with contemporaries such as Richard Serra and Eva Hesse as well as choreographers like Yvonne Rainer and Trisha Brown, who refreshed dance with everyday gestures and basic tasks. At the same time, as Anne Wagner has argued, Nauman held on to historical sculpture as a ‘shadow ...”

“... served in a number of ministerial roles before losing his seat in 2019; and the attorney general, Richard Hermer KC, a barrister appointed from full-time practice at Matrix Chambers.The published list of ministerial appointments included an asterisk against the outsiders’ names with a footnote recording that the king intended to confer on each a peerage for ...”

“... anachronistic, antiqued model of “good literature”’; he quoted the naturalist Richard Mabey, who, like Fisher, had known and loved that coast for years. To read Sebald, according to Mabey, was to watch the belittlement of ‘a very close friend’.Fisher’s first book, Capitalist Realism: Is There No Alternative? was published towards the ...”

“... major blight, a steady stream of ‘I-Spy’ water fowl. Fish corpses (nothing more exciting than white-bellied carp). I think we can assume that we have penetrated the Lea Valley’s recreational zone. Boats. Wet suits. Easy access to the North Circular Road, the broken link of an earlier orbital fantasy. This border is marked by a permanent pall of thick ...”

“... man’. Clara Saint, however, spoke to the French border police, one of whom happened to be a White Russian. Plain-clothed officers took up position close to where Nureyev was sitting with his minders. All he had to do was go up to them and ask for freedom, which he duly did. There was a brief tug-of-war, with Nureyev in the middle, until the French ...”

“... again, and Betjeman and Pevsner, whose antipathies were more convergent than is claimed). Dazzling white walls, streamlining, vitrolite, green window frames, green pantiles (often blue in Bournemouth). Among its most satisfying examples – i.e. the gaudiest – were apartment blocks at Pinner, Muswell Hill, Smithfield, Highgate. They are the décor of film ...”