“... sponsored domestic opera and ballet companies, as well as theatre groups in Europe. Ted Hughes and Peter Brook wrote an experimental play, Orghast at Persepolis, merging the myth of Prometheus with Aeschylus’ The Persians, which was staged at Persepolis as part of the Shiraz Arts Festival. Subsidised in part by the Iranian government, actors from twelve ...”

“... drugs out of his list of rivulets because, I’d guess, he was above them. In close-up he has a white-bearded hawk of a face, with the clear eyes of a fighter pilot. He made me think of James Salter and his code of taciturn manliness.But then you meet another witness who explains the big gap between ordering the death of your enemy from 15,000 feet and ...”

“... even festive. By way of a prank, it seems, the ghost leaves a kettle lid perched like a beret on a white china cat (the domestic clutter on mantelpieces and sideboards is ideal territory for a poltergeist). Evans sends out for cakes and buys new glasses for the spirit to destroy. Fodor is an amiable presence, cracking jokes as he makes copious ...”

“... phone calls to the writer, Sam Shepard. For Wings of Desire Wenders had his old collaborator Peter Handke write nine ‘texts’, including a poem about childhood: but otherwise the film had no script. As Wenders told an interviewer, ‘I said to myself, “The idea came so spontaneously, we must go on like that. We must remain spontaneous.” Everyone ...”

“... in Europe: they have been virtually eliminated, according to Mitford, in the United States. Peter Chamberlen, a Huguenot barber-surgeon whose family settled in London, invented the forceps in 1588. The family kept it a secret for over a hundred years, travelling about to attend the births of those wealthy enough to pay for their ministrations. Not only ...”

“... all those tumbling, ambiguous green metaphors. Inundation, crushed lungs, steepling walls of white water, Frankenstein’s monster liberated from his Arctic prison, cities swallowed in the chilling rush. The fears were out. Weather as threat, like Larkin’s sexual intercourse, began with the Beatles. It was canonised from the pulpit by Gregory Bateson ...”

“... Satanic Verses, and those many historical victims of Western culture who advocate expunging Dead White Males and their views from academic curricula. Relationships between art and evil ideas (and practices too) should of course be elucidated, but ought we to ban Edmund Spenser for his genocidal views of the Irish, or Carlyle for his theses on the ‘nigger ...”

“... As Meiroku’s flute spiralled higher and higher with two hand drums whipping the air faster, the white bird flew up in the air. People saw the trailing ends of his costume in mid air. Just as they expected them to descend towards the stage floor, Zeami opened and shut his mouth just so slightly and the heavenly bird was seen floating higher on a farther ...”

“... if technically difficult way to decorate a Gothic building, was obtained from the German painter Peter von Cornelius. Hugely popular exhibitions of potential schemes were held in Westminster Hall and much discussed, for the public expected a lot for their money. The scheme was supposed to encourage artists, educate visitors, stimulate the members of the ...”

“... Frankenstein … obsessed with one xenophobic idea’. ‘There was disquiet across the white world,’ de Bellaigue writes, at Mossadegh’s ‘show of Oriental bad form’. The Foreign Office started a campaign to persuade the American public of the rightness of the British cause and the US press duly fell in with it. The New York Times and the ...”

“... Meanwhile, historians and polemicists, inspired by new theories about the Caucasian origin of white humans, hailed the Germans as the central, Aryan actors of human history – and identified the Jews as their hereditary opponents, stodgy, shifty and subhuman. The story reaches its deeply ironic conclusion in the 20th century. Tacitus, whom Milton called ...”

“... a man who interprets the view for him (‘It is the grey-haired mountain. Abyad! Its turban is white’) on a hilltop overlooking Damascus: ‘Will you not be going down to the city?’ the man asked suddenly. He had joined me as I was climbing the hill, and his curiosity had not been satisfied. ‘How long do you stay in Damascus?’ ‘I don’t ...”

“... found ways to mark the city as their own. Nicholas fortified the Borgo, the area around Saint Peter’s Basilica, and rebuilt the Trevi fountain, part of an ancient system that still brought water into the city (one of the tasks, and one of the marks, of authority in Rome). Julius planned to drive a long, straight road, the Via Giulia, through the heart ...”

“... not in the core countries of capitalist development, but on its margins – among (non-Catholic) white settler societies, in Australasia and the North American Midwest and West, but especially in Scandinavia. (Therborn warns us against simple and unilineal models of the relations between economic and cultural transformation, apart from the patent economic ...”

“... extent of supporting ‘moderately repressive regimes’ if they happen to be allies. Accordingly, Peter Stuart reported in the Christian Science Monitor of 29 January that Congressional hearings were likely to be scheduled on the ‘terms of the hostage release agreement...treatment of the hostages...embassy security’ and – as a kind of afterthought ...”