“... be president (if only). In 1972 he supported McGovern (but died before the election). Robert Penn Warren, reviewing Patriotic Gore for Commentary, was surely right to say that what most moved Wilson was ‘some courageous manifestation of the old virtues’, regardless of political affiliation. Once when he was asked why he was so anti-British, he replied ...”

“... modern definitions comes in Burke’s 1794 report for the House of Commons on the impeachment of Warren Hastings, the governor-general of Bengal. Partisans of Hastings claimed that a great proportion of the evidence of corruption against him was ‘merely circumstantial’. Burke pointed out that all evidence apart from confession derives from ...”

“... slavery, Haitian officials signed the document which was to prove the beginning of the end for any hope of autonomy. The French king agreed to recognise Haiti’s independence only if the new republic paid France an indemnity of 150 million francs and reduced its import and export taxes by half. The ‘debt’ that Haiti recognised was incurred by the slaves ...”

“... Michael Bloomberg, who was in any case only running to thwart the socialist Sanders. Elizabeth Warren, briefly a front runner, held on through Super Tuesday, though by January her campaign had cratered and a desperate attempt to paint Sanders as sexist did nothing to revive it. The centrist fix was in. At the funeral of the civil rights icon John Lewis in ...”

“... under-the-flyover-Portobello-Road colony that belongs on the South Coast – in Hastings or the warren of junk-peddling back streets around the station in Brighton. The warning signs never change: cards in newsagents’ windows advertising Tarot readings and patchouli-oil massage leavened with a rash of charity shops and a plague of cheap books. Here are ...”

“... was twenty years old). ‘Dear Mr Gable,’ Garland sings,I am writing this to youAnd I hope that you will read it so you knowMy heart beats like a hammerAnd I stutter and I stammerEvery time I see you at the picture show.I guess I’m just another fan of yoursAnd I thought I’d write and tell you so.She then starts to sing the familiar words:You ...”

“... Why 99 years? Because a lease needs a date. Why did the Qing dynasty sign? Because its last hope lay in getting foreign help against its own people, and it was ready to sign anything. The lease was never ratified, no rent was ever paid, and China gained nothing tangible from it – except that, by expiring, it has brought the rest of Hong Kong, ‘ceded ...”

“... his poetry is least negotiable in the hands of people who read it on the look-out for what they hope to find there. He knew himself to be a great poet, a man privileged to receive the awesome and often close to terrifying visitations of genius. It is about the gestations of that poetry that he most often writes, as if in wonderment at his own ...”

“... Lillian Hellman, Mary McCarthy, Truman Capote, Robert Lowell, Elizabeth Hardwick, Robert Penn Warren, Peter Matthiessen, Philip Roth, Irwin Shaw and the always vivacious William Burroughs (‘He is an absolutely astonishing personage, with the grim mad face of Savonarola and a hideously tailored 1925 shit-coloured overcoat and scarf to match with a grey ...”

“... alleys and back ways of this quiet town would end in the badlands of Montana.’ When her father (Warren Oates) finds out she’s been seeing a man ‘ten years older than me and … from the wrong side of the tracks, so called’, he punishes her by killing her dog and having her take extra music lessons. At the red-bricked music school she looks out of a ...”

“... remedies address risks that do not need to exist in the first place.’ In 2001, two years before Warren Buffett warned that derivatives were ‘financial weapons of mass destruction’, El Diwany identified them as a likely cause of ‘serious breakdown in the financial system’. He could find no honest ‘Islamic’ approach to these instruments; like an ...”

“... our children, our parents, or defend us and uphold our inalienable rights, sir. But we truly hope that our show has inspired you to uphold our American values and to work on behalf of all of us.’ This has at least the value of staking a claim to decency in language that is decent; but the hopeful words of the performers of Hamilton and the flailing ...”

“... of loathing to Albanians. The barracks were disposed around the building in a kind of overground warren. They had originally contained more than a hundred people, but by 1998 there were only forty. Most of them, like the Marinkovic family, were Serbs from the Krajina. Djuro Marinkovic, his daughter Anka and their dependants were refugees in the remains of ...”

“... all views are moved by institutional loyalty and discipline. That was so in the Hughes Court, the Warren Court, the Burger Court – and it will be so in the Rehnquist Court. I mentioned that Near v. Minnesota was a five-to-four decision. Just five years later a unanimous Court applied its teachings in holding invalid a special tax on newspapers. One of the ...”

“... to the Conference were besieging Abacha even before he finished stating the terms – in the hope of a juicy government contract that would make them millionaires. This is to say nothing of those – like Kingibe, the Chief’s running mate – who didn’t need to be asked twice before agreeing to join the Conference, thus enabling Abacha to maintain ...”