“... select audiences, Morris observes, Zionist leaders like David Ben-Gurion and Moshe Sharrett were frank about the reasons for Arab revolt against British rule and Zionist immigration from 1936 to 1939. The violence derived not from a Levantine strain of European anti-semitism, but from the fact that, in Ben-Gurion’s words, ‘we and they want the same ...”

“... involved with the centrifuge programme, which only gets a few mentions in his book. According to Frank von Hippel, professor of public and international affairs at Princeton and a former assistant director for national security in the White House, ‘Iraq had difficulty producing reliable [centrifuge] machines’ and ‘no [centrifuge] production facility ...”

“... for not making clear the homosexuality of Stravinsky’s younger brother Gury, to whom he was close, and whose early death left him feeling he had ‘an unrepayable debt’. Craft makes the persuasive point that ‘Stravinsky’s protectiveness toward his androgynous friends – Cocteau, Eugene Berman, Poulenc, Henze, Boulez, Copland, Carlos ...”

“... already had a powerbase there, and he embodied the connection between province and court. As a Frank married to a Bavarian noblewoman, Keila, he used the classic entrée to provincial standing. In the 790s, he had established his reputation in the office of seneschal, responsible for feeding the royal household. The court scholars gave him the nickname ...”

“... the National Book Award for Between the World and Me, his essay on race and violence. Coates’s close friend Prince Jones was killed in Virginia in 2000. ‘When Prince Jones died, there were no cameras. There was nobody looking. The officer that killed him was not prosecuted. He was not even disciplined by the police force.’ In the Cincinnati ...”

“... itself may not have included the bit about ‘being placed on an equality’ or the queen’s frank recognition of the events of 1857-58 as being ‘a bloody civil war’ rather than ‘a mere military mutiny’. But it did enter the Indian consciousness. By 1875, many educated Indians could recite it by heart. Meetings of the Indian National Congress ...”

“... recalled. O’Brien told me that she wanted ‘their diaries, their souls’, and referred to Anne Frank. But the girls she met were ‘very shy, and also reluctant to talk’. Committed to producing a work of fiction that had documentary authority, she made contact with social workers, doctors and journalists.The real mistake​ , seen so often in travel ...”

“... million last year, despite warnings from watchdogs and experts, but then failed to raise anything close to that sum. Under Johnson, the Conservatives received donations of £5.7 million in the first week of the 2019 election campaign. Sunak raised barely a third of that in the entire 2024 campaign. When the alleged racist comments about Diane Abbott made by ...”

“... Rossellini – but also about recent films such as Alien: Resurrection (‘inventive, honest and frank’) and Paul Verhoeven’s Starship Troopers (‘I’ve seen it twice and I like it a lot’).At some point I wrote a fan letter to David Thomson. In his reply, he urged me to develop interests other than film. That was Spielberg’s problem, Thomson said ...”

“... warmth. Because he had spent so much time in prison and then in New York, he had no set of close friends or trusted comrades. His judgment was also flawed; his initial sense that there was a new energy in Irish nationalism proved to be wrong.In 1907, politically and culturally, Dublin could just as easily have seemed what James Joyce called ‘a centre ...”

“... for conducting them on the telephone (on a ‘don’t ring me, I’ll ring you’ basis). Close friends – of whom he appears to have had few – describe how he would ‘burn people up’, overwhelming them with demands for attention and affection, beguiling them, and then, often without explanation or warning, cutting them off (he would do this ...”

“... full of Charles Kennedy being, or having been, an alcoholic. I’d have thought Churchill came close and Asquith, too, and when it comes to politics it’s hardly a disabling disease. Except to the press. But less perilous, I would have thought, to have a leader intoxicated with whisky than one like Blair, intoxicated with himself. 17 January. At the ...”

“... The plebiscite form asked for approval or disapproval of the 1946 NHS Act. The Lancet, which had close associations with the Labour Government, urged doctors to recognise that their ‘true interest, like that of the people, is in peace’. Clegg and the BMA asked for war. Bevan became utterly fed up and spoke of ‘a small body of politically poisoned ...”

“... and each clearly recognised elements of himself in the other. Their friendship, sometimes close and sometimes hanging by a thread, endured until Britten’s death in 1976. In his autobiography Tippett acknowledged that Britten had once proposed they go to bed together. Soden provides an unsparing account, including the forlorn detail that Britten ...”

“... in 1939 show him in a well-lit studio wearing what looks like a doctor’s white coat, sitting close to Wilma Javor, the young woman he is drawing. Clothed old men drawing naked young women are one of Picasso’s subjects, even though Picasso didn’t spend much time working that way; Matisse did. You could guess this – and also deduce that he sat ...”