“... in a pile of abandoned stuff outside one of the houses, a rise and fall French light fitting, white pottery shade, a little battered, but with the counterweight intact. It’s a nice find, though, like its ex-owners, we don’t need the fitting, but if we did … It’s cheering for R., who’s in turmoil over developments at the magazine and has pretty ...”

“... policy finds little or no support in economic theory. More than a thousand economists wrote to the White House imploring the president to think again. Undaunted, he persisted with tariffs across the board, twinning them with the repatriation of more than a million Mexicans (half of whom were US citizens). The president that Chu is quoting was of course Herbert ...”

“... they got.’ On 1 May 2003, I heard that 140 American soldiers had died in combat in Iraq. I heard Richard Perle tell Americans to ‘relax and celebrate victory’. I heard him say: ‘The predictions of those who opposed this war can be discarded like spent cartridges.’ I heard Lieutenant-General Jay Garner say: ‘We ought to look in a mirror and get ...”

“... The way to match the Trump pace is by tweeting; but that is to play his game – a gambit the White House press corps have found irresistible. Much of the damage to US politics over the last two years has been done by the anti-Trump media themselves, with their mood of perpetual panic and their lack of imagination. But the uncanny gift of Trump is an ...”

“... years. He saw no point in legislating on racial matters and on the integration of coloured and white children in schools. Change, he believed, would have to emerge from the localities themselves. On McCarthy, he seems to have been most disturbed by the possibility that foreign governments might think that he was typical of America. Although he was angered ...”

“... does not tend to increase punctiliousness. Don’t be alarmed, there are a few white folks even up here. Nice disagreeable sort of letter isn’t it? Glad you & dad seem to be enjoying life. I don’t suppose anyone can live in books steadily & not get grouched occasionaly. Have seen & heard nothing out-side this cramped narrow lopsided ...”

“... send you home with some money.’ ‘Why would I lie?’ They hung me by my arms and beat me. Two white Americans, in their forties, arrived. They were wearing normal clothes. They asked: ‘Where is Osama bin Laden?’ ‘Who’s that?’ ‘You’re fucking with us? You’re al-Qaida, yes!’ They kept using the F-word. I didn’t understand this word but I ...”

“... understood the way national security blurs the line between the possible and the actual than Richard Perle. ‘How far Saddam’s gone on the nuclear weapons side I don’t think we really know,’ Perle said on one occasion. ‘My guess is it’s further than we think. It’s always further than we think, because we limit ourselves, as we think about ...”

“... by God that was how he shone and there was no spotlight or anything,’ Mann said. ‘It was so white it was electrifying.’ The Cid was death itself, waging war.The story, first written down in the 13th century, appears to have originated at the monastery of San Pedro de Cardeña, which received Rodrigo’s cadaver. In the days leading up to his ...”

“... sculptures Newman would go on to make. The first one, Here I (also 1950), was made up of two thin white verticals in wood, eight feet tall, one finished in rough plaster, the other in smooth paint, set on plaster mounds on top of a wooden milk crate.Where The Wild stretched painting to its vertical limit, Vir Heroicus Sublimis (1951) did the same with its ...”

“... and he went out of his way to get it. He had read the novel The Brick Foxhole by his friend Richard Brooks, and his memories of Camp Pendleton, where he had served as a drill sergeant in 1944 and 1945, brought the character close to home. ‘I know that son of a bitch,’ he said of the brutal anti-Semite in the script, named Montgomery. ‘No one knows ...”

“... politely inquired: ‘Do you wish to pass me on the left or on the right?’ The incident, which Richard Boston recounts in his biographical memoir of Lancaster, captures something essential about a man who, as a cartoonist and writer excelled in capturing types, human and architectural, yet himself remained hard to typify. Georgian (Town) Pillar to ...”

“... show how durable that change has been, he could have pointed to today’s exemplars of this ideal: Richard Layard’s Wellbeing Programme at the LSE, for instance, which makes the case for measuring national happiness alongside calculations of GDP.National happiness, of course, is a difficult thing to recognise, let alone measure, and it isn’t always clear ...”

“... he is left scanning the guerrilla movements of the 1960s from a great distance. The contrast with Richard Gott’s Guerrilla Movements in Latin America (first published in 1971) is striking. Brown’s grasp of US policy, with all its subtleties and contradictions, seems uncertain too. On the overthrow of Argentina’s president Arturo Frondizi in March ...”

“... papers, and they come with all sorts of biases favouring papers in prestigious journals by white men from prestigious institutions. The chance of creating perverse incentives is also high. Tying core funding to grant income, for example, would prompt universities to put even more pressure on staff to chase grants than they do already.Researchers ...”