“... entries read: ‘George, age 27, prime cotton planter; Sue, age 26, prime rice planter; George Jr, age 4, boy child; Harry, age 2, boy child.’ Listings for 432 other slaves follow. Another indispensable source is a 28-page pamphlet published soon after the auction took place. Its author was Mortimer Thomson, a reporter for the New York Tribune, the ...”

“... amusing if one keeps one’s head. Here’s Diana writing to Nancy while trying to get away from Bryan Guinness: The detectives are extraordinary and just like one would imagine. It is really rather heavenly to feel that they are around – no pickpockets can approach etc. Isn’t it all extremely amusing in a way. I mean there is such a great army of them ...”

“... Force document indicates bombs were dropped on buildings near the border, and Pentagon spokesman Bryan Whitman conceded there may have been another strike that occurred outside the view of the drone’s camera.’ Pakistan’s ambassador in Washington, Husain Haqqani, merely denied that the air strikes had been intentionally hostile and stressed the ...”

“... being termed an ‘imperial presidency’ (the title of an influential book by Arthur Schlesinger Jr, published in 1973, which argued that with superpower status the American executive was exceeding its constitutional prerogatives). The Trilateral Commission – a discussion group founded by David Rockefeller to bring together policymakers, academics and ...”

“... the Tokyo Olympics.Rodchenkov will be familiar to some as the dishevelled, Orwell-quoting star of Bryan Fogel’s documentary Icarus (he also features tangentially in Walsh’s book, where Yulia accuses him of extortion; Rodchenkov, in turn, is dismissive of the Stepanovs, calling them a ‘telegenic young couple’ and Yulia ‘a has-been runner I have ...”

“... scrum, when their need is to be as separate as sentries. What a shame that R. & J. didn’t get Bryan Robertson to give them a hand! Henry Moore used to say that Robertson’s Rothko show at the Whitechapel was the most moving exhibition of a modern artist he had ever seen. Robertson also did a beautiful Pollock show there. The hang of the Pollocks here is ...”

“... runs through the whole book. It’s sung by a louche gentleman of the privy chamber, Francis Bryan, known as ‘the vicar of hell’, and lewd variations of it are hummed by soldiers. Cromwell’s jester struts and performs it in the persona of the king. ‘Pastime with good company’ is really what the book should have been called, since the fall of ...”

“... the United Kingdom – has a sinister, though not altogether unhappy significance. As Dominic Bryan argues in his lively essay in Belfast 400, the M2 and the Westlink have served as a bleak cordon sanitaire between some of the rival sectarian ghettoes in the west of the city. Moreover, as the security forces were quick to recognise, the limited number of ...”

“... history. Isn’t Trump just another Andrew Jackson, another George Wallace or William Jennings Bryan? ‘The people have a right to make their own mistakes …’ The people are always looking for a charlatan. Even the spectacle is nothing new. Demagogues are demagogues, always in love with the latest technology: newsprint, the back of an endless railroad ...”

“... ear. Two men together in a car being swept by searchlights. This was the episode in which Bryan Cranston plays a man tormented by a piercing hum that will make his head explode unless he drives west as fast as possible. Cranston was the actor my co-writer, Heidi Schreck, had picked to play my father in our planned adaptation of my book about ...”

“... protagonists at the Scopes trial: Scopes, Clarence Darrow who defended him and William Jennings Bryan who tried to have him sent to jail. Garretto’s dignified, floating Calvin Coolidge head (1928) elevates the colourless President, and although the anorexic, pimpled, almost mouthless ‘silent Cal’ in Covarrubias’s 1925 caricature is perhaps the ...”

“... involved. John Conolly (the pioneering advocate of non-restraint) becomes ‘Connolly’; Bryan Waller Procter (a commissioner in lunacy who advised Thackeray) is ‘Proctor’. The consistent misspelling of Procter is particularly damaging. Procter and his wife were among the closest of Thackeray’s confidants and Procter is the dedicatee of Vanity ...”

“... there shouldn’t have been any left. But of course there were, and are, plenty of them. The late Bryan Wilson, a taxonomist of sects, was reduced to inventing a special category for the Quakers, a sect which should have turned into a denomination but obstinately refused to do so. Endogamy had something to do with that. Among my many Quaker relations I recall ...”

“... tale of Rockefeller’s Standard Oil Company, as well as politicians such as William Jennings Bryan, Robert La Follette and even (for a while) Woodrow Wilson, whose New Freedom campaign of 1912 proposed to renew entrepreneurial opportunities through anti-trust and regulatory policies. He recalls a certain kind of populist progressive: distrustful of big ...”

“... buffa that keeps delivering.As well as Epstein and Maxwell it can offer such bit players as John Bryan; Steve Wyatt, ‘a hunky Texan oilman’, and his biological father, Bobby Lipman (who killed a young woman while tripping); Ruth, Lady Fermoy; Major Ron Ferguson’s loyalty to the Wigmore Club (a massage parlour); the queen mother’s lodged ...”