“... writers, Camus ‘was prepared for the postwar spectacle of American racism’. He had also read Richard Wright, whose work he arranged to be translated by Gallimard. Yet in his North American diaries he has little to say about the ‘Negro Question’, other than that a Martinican employee of the French embassy, forced to rent in Harlem, had only just ...”

“... on Soviet clients like Egypt and Syria. It occasionally helped protect other US allies (like King Hussein of Jordan) and its military prowess forced Moscow to spend more on backing its own client states. It also provided useful intelligence about Soviet capabilities. Backing Israel was not cheap, however, and it complicated America’s relations with the ...”

“... the interval I stood in line for the men’s room with the philosopher Tom Nagel, the sociologist Richard Sennett, the poet Fred Seidel and the conservative sage William Buckley. I suppose Brendel’s intellectual and technical mastery is about the only kind to which sensible people of almost every description want to pay tribute, even if to do so involves a ...”

“... When​ King Fahd of Saudi Arabia discovered in late November 1990 that his friend Margaret Thatcher had been turfed out of Downing Street after 11 years he thought she must have been the victim of a coup d’état. How else to explain it? She was undefeated in general elections and, more puzzling still, she was about to send her armed forces into battle ...”

“... school for three hundred years, explained that in phrases like Rex et Regina beati, ‘the blessed King and Queen’, the adjective beati is plural (agreeing in number with Rex et Regina) and masculine (agreeing in gender with Rex), because ‘the masculine gender is more worthy than the feminine, and the feminine more worthy than the neuter.’ (In ...”

“... to see its appeal. Eraserhead might have vanished if it hadn’t been for Ben Barenholtz, the king of New York’s midnight movie scene, who had also popularised Alejandro Jodorowsky’s ‘acid Western’ El Topo and John Waters’s ‘filth epic’ Pink Flamingos. Waters – a direct contemporary but no eagle scout – was another early ...”

“... unrecorded meeting of the ‘Inner Cabinet’ four months earlier (24 July). The attendance of Richard Mulcahy at that restricted meeting is, I am sure, correctly ascribed to the fact that he was Chief of Staff of the Army, while the presence of Erskine Childers is explained on the grounds that he was Substitute Director of Publicity. However, in the list ...”

“... a protocol, or draft treaty, was ready for signature in Montreal. The chief American negotiator, Richard Benedick, conceding that the science was still far from precise, pleaded for a rapid response. ‘If we are to err in designing measures to protect the ozone layer, then let us, conscious of our responsibility to future generations, err on the side of ...”

“... they made a conspicuous instance of satire from high to low. The watchwords of solidarity, ‘Je suis Charlie,’ could be repeated by state officials in France, Britain and the US who regularly censored reports of drone killings in Pakistan and Yemen.Here is a thought experiment. What would be the Western reaction to a cartoonist who leaned heavily on ...”

“... projects. Among the constructors, there was some outright fraud: George Hudson, the ‘railway king’, ran his business as a pyramid scheme. By 1850, those £100 of shares were only worth £70, and speculators who’d failed to leave the party early were ruined. The point about railway mania isn’t that it opened people’s eyes to the folly of expecting ...”

“... cultural revival. Georgians were making stupendous films; the Rustaveli Theatre’s production of Richard III pulverised Edinburgh audiences who understood not a word of the language. The nation was rediscovering its past, and falling in love with what it discovered. One favourite anecdote told of a senior Georgian Communist who was expelled from the party ...”

“... more unsavoury amours and making clucking sounds of bourgeois disapproval, he incurred the ire of King Saul. Roth took Bellow’s side, because of course he did. ‘The writers I admired most in the world were conspiring against me,’ Atlas lamented, victim of a classic squeeze play. As a bonus indignity Roth inserted a nasty sideswipe at an Atlas-like ...”

“... being a canary-bird; I replied (bleatingly) protesting that there was no use in turning life into King Lear; presently it was discovered that there were two dead combatants upon the field, each slain by an arrow of the truth, and we tenderly carried off each other’s corpses. Here is a little comedy for Henry James to write!‘This is a fellow novelist’s ...”

“... not stop bitter enemies in the Party from becoming important regional figures, like Biedenkopf (‘King Kurt’) in Saxony. The SPD has never allowed the same personalisation of authority. When it has been in power, the pattern has always been a diarchy – Brandt and Herbert Wehner, or Schmidt and Brandt – with the Chancellor flanked by a powerful and ...”

“... in 1875, and known for his charisma, cunning and strategic skills, was dubbed ‘the uncrowned king of Ireland’. He was brought down in 1890, having been named by William O’Shea as co-respondent in a divorce action, and died the following year.) It didn’t even look as though Sinn Féin had captured the public imagination. In opening his tobacco shop ...”