“... on him. The front cover of Tynan’s Letters, published in 1994, features a portrait taken by David Bailey, itself a sign of pop status. The front cover of The Diaries of Kenneth Tynan is a close up of its subject inhaling, eyes shut, fingers splayed; its back cover, three shots of him in different stages of smoking – an action-sequence of sorts. How ...”

“... send them to Egypt.’ In the past two years Egypt has signed major new arms deals with the US and France, while Donald Trump – whose own administration’s attacks on the media and exploitation of ‘fake news’ echoes some of Sisi’s tactics and rhetoric – has labelled his Egyptian counterpart ‘a fantastic guy’. In late 2015, ...”

“... to prove noble descent as well as their entitlement to ever greater accumulations of wealth. In France, the forked branches of genealogical trees looked to some like a pé de grue, or ‘crane’s foot’, which became the English ‘pedigree’, a biologically fuzzy idea related to shared blood that jumped from human families to valuable animals like dogs ...”

“... into the national culture. Britain developed a hierarchy of race to suit its colonial empire. France prides the alleged colour-blindness of its secular republic to such an extent that it forbids the collection of census data on the race or ethnicity of its citizens, yet racial discrimination plainly exists in French society. Does ‘white’ ethnic ...”

“... Commission for the loss of human property. What’s harder to measure, as the historian David Richardson noted, is the sheer ‘utility or pleasure’ Bristolians derived from the consumption of slave-produced sugar and snuff.As Hazel V. Carby writes in Imperial Intimacies, it was not just traders who profited from slavery. Residents working on the ...”

“... cheerful children who were watching television, having snacks.’*On his state visit to the UK and France to commemorate the Normandy landing, the president of the United States is distressed to find that Fox News is not available, and calls on Americans to boycott an American corporation: AT&T, which owns CNN. On his first night, he wakes up at 1.30 a.m. to ...”

“... secession war in 1993 (another $600,000 was intercepted before he could pay it into his account). David Mirtskhulava, the former minister of energy, had a mild heart attack when he was charged with pocketing $6 million on its way to pay Georgia’s bill for electricity imports. Georgia is not a sprawling continent, but a poor, steep country about the same ...”

“... drawer. The man was a premature European, shunted, iffy suitcase in hand, from Spain to Italy to France. What he did was work, or live, or sit for the 18th time through the video of the Brian De Palma/Al Pacino re-make of Scarface. ‘Remember, Tony, every day above ground is a good day.’ The posthumous Raymond novel, Not till the Red Fog Rises, moves with ...”

“... it does not preclude the right of private and co-operative forms of ownership as well. Sweden and France have pioneered other ways of helping to maintain a diversity of newspapers by various forms of subsidy. The obvious danger of government subsidies for the press is the risk of insidious state intervention, or the favouring of some newspapers over ...”

“... surviving early sermons: recycled, inoffensive homilies in which the revolutionary events in France were scarcely even noises off. (The mild young Malthus could have been a clergyman in a Jane Austen novel.) A younger son of an eccentric landowning father, ‘Bob’ was born with a cleft palate which made comprehensible speech difficult for him and ...”

“... Guided at times by Gramsci’s concept of cultural hegemony, Eugene Genovese, Eric Foner and David Brion Davis conceived slavery as a mode of organising labour, as well as a system of racial domination. This led to the recognition that advocates of ‘free labour’ had economic as well as humanitarian reasons for opposing slavery, and that the Northern ...”

“... landowner. Her father was Henry, Lord Morley, the scholarly translator of Petrarch and Plutarch. David Starkey begins an essay on Lord Morley by wondering whether we should class him like Prufrock as an ‘attendant lord’: ‘one that will do/To swell a progress, start a scene or two,/Advise the prince.’ Lord Morley never did become a royal ...”

“... restaurants of Dubai, a city built on a Gotham-like scale, the wealthy eat oysters imported from France ($15 each at Atmosphere, the highest restaurant in the world, a quarter of a mile up the Burj Khalifa tower). The Gulf dynasties resemble the despotic families of 15th-century Italy and their city states. The earlier set of potentates owed their rise to ...”

“... people in other countries, beyond the reach of US law. By early 1952 there were Artichoke teams in France, occupied Germany, Japan and South Korea; more were added later. Directives were issued specifying that interrogations be carried out in a ‘safe house or safe area’, with an adjoining room for recording equipment, and a bathroom, which might be found ...”

“... on the prominence of ‘the morbid and the tragic’ in his own work, the Guyanese poet David Dabydeen once said that ‘the plantation experience had severe and traumatic psychic impacts … but overwhelmingly had to do with what is the very ground of our being, which is our body.’ This is an obvious reason slavery goes with revenge tragedy. The ...”