“... palatable to Republicans. The book – highly readable thanks to the efforts of its ghost, Mark Zwonitzer – opens with a kitchen table conversation at Biden’s grandparents’ house in Scranton, Pennsylvania in the 1950s:Grandpop, his pals from the neighbourhood, maybe a crony from the Scranton Tribune, and my Finnegan uncles, Jack and ...”

“... said very truly, belonged to an old, honourable tradition that ought to be revived. It is indeed a mark of political decadence that there has been so little of it against Mrs Thatcher’s regime: none since the war has more deserved it. Treason has never been easy to define precisely, a fact illustrated by the long series of Tudor laws about it. It is an ...”

“... along the boat deck and got into conversation with the elder man. I noticed that there was a mark on the bridge of his nose through wearing spectacles, that he had recently shaved off a moustache, and that he was growing a beard. The young fellow was very reserved, and I remarked about his cough.   ‘Yes,’ said the elder man, ‘my boy has a weak ...”

“... poem was written against a rising tide of mob lynchings in the American South. When Winston Churchill appeared before the US Congress petitioning for American support in the darkest hours of World War Two, he quoted from it without acknowledging the author:If we must die – let it not be like hogsHunted and penned in an inglorious spot,While ...”

“... about politics and hitched his wagon more conspicuously to causes, he was strangely wide of the mark. He believed, as only a millionaire could, that ‘Working-Class Hero’ was ‘a revolutionary song’ (true, inasmuch as it forecast the Thatcher revolution); he had half a mind to idolise Mao (a lot of people did, from Richard Nixon to Julia Kristeva). At ...”

“... to artistically unschooled violon d’Ingres types like D.H. Lawrence, Arnold Schoenberg, Winston Churchill and Prince Charles – talented amateur painters, possibly, but not exactly what you would call marginal or psychically alienated figures. Euphemistic, in turn, because once again the sheer intransigence of outsider art – its ...”

“... Winston Churchill’s decision to drop the world’s first atomic bomb on Berlin on 1 July 1947 wasn’t a difficult one. The war hadn’t been going well since the landings in the Pas de Calais in May 1946 were thrown back with terrible losses – a failure that had much to do with the amount of treasure and materiel that had been diverted to Britain’s nuclear weapons programme ...”

“... April 1944. Winston Churchill sent a memo to Herbert Morrison at the Home Office: Let me have a report on why the Witchcraft Act, 1735, was used in a modern Court of Justice. What was the cost of this trial to the State, observing that witnesses were brought from Portsmouth and maintained here in this crowded London, for a fortnight, and the Recorder kept busy with all this obsolete tomfoolery, to the detriment of necessary work in the Courts? The person tried and convicted at the war-damaged Old Bailey was a stout and ailing Scotswoman called Helen Duncan, whom few people loved and many exploited ...”

“... his own convenience,’ Crossman observed about an incident in which he revealed his support for Winston Churchill instead of Barbara Castle. Bevan felt an affinity with Churchill, and perhaps hoped for an analogous vindication in ignoring all the ordinary rules of political advancement. Crossman warned Bevan early in 1956 that he must play with the team if ...”

“... quotations or dismiss them as self-indulgent distractions or pointless jokes, which misses the mark.The postwar bebop jazzmen employed musical quotations even more often than Ellington. Charlie Parker frequently concludes fast-paced, hard-swinging numbers by stopping on a dime and gaily quoting – out of tempo, with leisurely elegance – from Percy ...”

“... will start at Harrow and follow a track across town, in the footsteps of Tory grandees like Winston Churchill, all the way to Downing Street. The gimmick is that urban fracking will be a horizontal manoeuvre, like sliding poker chips across green baize. A blind grope rather than a full-frontal assault. And as for the nimby notion that violent insults to ...”

“... cronies. Jeremy HardingThe​  total number of Ukrainians on the move has passed the two million mark. The figure is rising. Before the Russians invaded, the UNHCR put the Ukrainian diaspora worldwide at roughly six million, the great majority in Europe. Just under twenty thousand of those were in France, where figures for new arrivals are also on the ...”