“... individuals who just happened to be ‘walking through the building’, as the House Speaker, Mike Johnson, put it. Trump recently referred to the riot and the prosecution against him as the ‘6 January Hoax’ and to the arrested rioters as ‘hostages’. His vice-presidential running mate, JD Vance, has described the defendants as ‘political ...”

“... has travelled on wind power came at the Conservative Party Conference in 2020, when Boris Johnson announced an expansion of offshore wind farms, declared that he wanted Britain to become the ‘Saudi Arabia of wind’ and ridiculed the politician from his own party who had, seven years earlier, denounced wind power as a crackpot Labour idea that ...”

“... about women and their clothes, how they wear them and also how they write about them, led me to Virginia Woolf and the term she coined: ‘frock consciousness’. On 6 January 1925, at the beginning of her diary for that year, she wrote: ‘I want to begin to describe my own sex.’ That thought recurs in the diary as the months go on and it is ...”

“... in the dismemberment of Bosnia. Memorable example: Brezhnev’s intimate consultation with Lyndon Johnson in the days before the invasion of Czechoslovakia.)The Cold War was ostensibly ‘about’ some quite important differences, arising from the post-war Stalinisation of Eastern Europe and from the competition for nuclear superiority. But it also had ...”

“... marital disaster and general ill-health, Eliot added to his Harvard commitment the University of Virginia lectures called After Strange Gods: A Primer of Modern Heresy, a topic that interested him more than his Harvard theme. These three lectures became a book, published at once but never subsequently reprinted. It is hardly surprising that he chose to meet ...”

“... relationships as sexual opportunities cost Duncan not a few companions, including his old friend Virginia Admiral, who turned her back on him after he admitted to sleeping with her future husband, Robert De Niro père. In 1951 he exchanged wedding vows with a man, Jess Collins, but while this gave him a stable home and a partner for life, it didn’t do much ...”

“... drawing an unspoken parallel, declaring that King may have been a great orator, but it was Lyndon Johnson who got the civil rights legislation passed. Certainly there are those who voted and will vote for or against Obama because of his race, but horizontal racism has largely disappeared in the US. These days, a white office worker generally has no problem ...”

“... is a Gaddafi-era general turned CIA asset who reappeared in Libya after twenty years in exile in Virginia to take part in the revolt in 2011. He then returned to the US, but cropped up again in February 2014, when he delivered a traditional coup-style broadcast on national television, claiming to have seized power on behalf of the ‘Supreme Council of the ...”

“... of literature in our time. Its two predecessors, The Imaginary Library (1982) and Samuel Johnson and the Impact of Print (first published in 1987 as Printing Technology, Letters and Samuel Johnson), which were issued by a different publisher, were less sourly jokey and less apocalyptic. The first in particular ...”

“... the South in 1996 and the remains of a label from a can of beef distributed by the Mennonites of Virginia were found on board, the Clinton Administration suppressed the information. Others have also been guilty of distortion. World Vision US’s vice-president Andrew Natsios warned in September that ‘at least half a million people have died, probably ...”

“... and opportunistic. Unhappily the president Obama seems gradually coming to resemble is Lyndon Johnson. Large social programmes have been spun out to unite the country at home, by a grand vision of a society with a new standard of generous conduct, while, in the background, the president and his generals dutifully prosecute an inherited war which the ...”

“... you what . . . You won’t find a nicer bit of woman’s flesh to be bought for that money in old Virginia. Don’t you see what a foot she has, so dainty and delicate, and what an ankle.’ But the trader is put off, because he suspects Hannah is ‘skittish’. Women turn skittish, he remarks, when they are parted from their children, though that is not ...”

“... congresses were held in Delos rather than Athens. Nato has two strategic commands: one based in Virginia, the other in Mons, Belgium. But since 1949 every holder of its senior military office, the Supreme Allied Commander Europe (SACEUR), has been a US general or admiral. Applications for membership of the alliance must be submitted to the US ...”

“... eccentric and once-off usages of a different cultural stratum, those of writers like T.S. Eliot, Virginia Woolf, W.H. Auden, Dylan Thomas and James Joyce (except for most of Finnegans Wake); though virtually no recognition is offered of the problem of using literary sources as evidence for current usage. Unfortunately, the Supplement is not beyond reproach ...”

“... and which it is the aim of the official biography to conceal’. This is very similar to Virginia Woolf’s view of traditional life-writing which she parodied in her fantasy-biography Orlando: ‘Directly we glance at eyes and forehead, we have to admit a thousand disagreeables which it is the aim of every good biographer to ignore ... all these ...”