“... and expert on China, a man who fascinates Steiner and whom he wanted to write about in Frank Kermode’s Modern Masters series, published in the 1970s. Steiner had first seen Needham at a protest meeting against Anglo-American intervention in Korea in 1950, at which the distinguished scientist claimed to have incontrovertible proof of the use of ...”

“... ship’ for emptying bladder rather than bowels.)Channon and Nicolson together give a close-up view of the abdication drama. In late October, Nicolson dined with Sibyl Colefax, Emerald Cunard and Laura Corrigan, hugely rich hostesses of a now vanished species, who devoted their lives to entertaining the London beau monde (Mrs Corrigan would give ...”

“... ideals and values’ in the wringer-washer on the back porch (where it usually was in Frank Capra’s films) and they came out cleansed of any taint of humiliation. We could hold our heads high again. We could reconsecrate the marriage of virtue and power. (The first-person plural was easily conflated with ‘the nation’ and ‘the ...”

“... For the Brzezinskis, the disappearance of Poland’s most famous composer was like the death of a close relative – ‘as tangible a note of darkness as any other news’.When the darkness finally began to lift, Brzezinski and his family witnessed what they saw as the abandonment of Poland by its erstwhile British and American friends, fearful of offending ...”

“... while claiming to be totally non-political, would often express opinions that were uncomfortably close to fascism.) When I first met her Linda had been a passionate admirer of the works of Tolkien but (possibly under my influence) was now beginning to grow out of them. Such feeble scraps of elementary data were about all that Jeremy and Harriet managed to ...”

“... initiatives. Diplomatic postures have been more significant than military. Under Schröder, close ties were developed with Russia, in an entente that became the most distinctive feature of his foreign policy. But this was not a second Rapallo Pact, at the expense of western neighbours. Under Chirac and Berlusconi, France and Italy courted Putin scarcely ...”

“... He set off the fire suppressants. I didn’t see any weapon, but I don’t want to get too close to the dude … He looked all jacked up.’The accused (I’ll call him Fletcher), dressed in orange prison scrubs, was acting as his own defence. He’d mastered some lawyerly phrases and quickly scored a point with them. ‘Objection! Did you see me pull ...”

“... every night ‘undress her before the fire … warm their bed with hot bricks, and then hold her close and kiss her, and how each morning he would warm her clothes and bring her figs and grapes and feed them to her’.Shortly after their marriage in 1879, Mabel got pregnant. She thought it was impossible to conceive except ‘at the climax moment of my ...”

“... front of our apartment, I was always jumping all over them in a passion.In Straight Life Pepper is frank – and hilarious – on the subject of his looks. Detailing his stay in an expensive detox sanitorium in Los Angeles in the mid-1950s, he recalls prinking about in the nude after getting some huge shots of morphine to mitigate the symptoms of heroin ...”

“... the offering of an adequate assurance to Britain on this issue. This explains the extraordinarily close secret co-operation between Britain and a supposedly neutral Ireland during the Second World War, fully reported to the British Cabinet by Lord Cranborne in February 1945, which included provision for British command of both Irish and British forces in the ...”

“... of Christina Wayne and grew dependent on the Walking Dead franchise, whose original showrunner, Frank Darabont, sued them for misappropriated profit share and won a $200 million payout. Darabont had been fired from the show halfway through the filming of the second season, and AMC was putting pressure on the cast not to speak to the media. The actors, an ...”

“... behalf. Another two days passed. The court did a U-turn and declared the election void. It was so close to election day that Romanians living abroad had already begun to vote. Georgescu, who seldom talks to journalists, released a statement claiming that the cancellation was ‘a barbaric act done by the oligarch state against democracy … the corrupt system ...”

“... crime itself . . . and adds a second defilement to the first’. Justice William Douglas came close. He saw Furman’s conviction as invalid because it was ‘pregnant with discrimination’ and because, more generally, a sort of moral evolution had brought society to a point where the death penalty – like branding, torture and public whipping before it ...”

“... be ‘seen’. These disturbing aspects of existence elsewhere solidify in the tale’s deft and frank, though often ignored, insistence on social realities. We are here in a milieu quite coherently lower-middle-class, that of the ‘alf-bred beggars’ of life – although that social conditioning doesn’t by any means, to my feeling, limit the impact of ...”

“... he describes them, of confusing active and passive in an oral act of sex. Suppose, to be brutally frank, that he blew when the cultural imperative was for being blown. He would find himself at the sharp end, not of a code of manners, which might judge his action on a par with using the wrong fork, but of a fixed set of religious meanings. He would be guilty ...”