“... in the afternoon Julian turned up with his ragged clothes torn to tatters, which flapped about his white thighs. He put on some clothes of mine and lay panting and sighing after the luxurious enjoyment of so much exercise.’His openness wasn’t typical of the rest of his family either. Julian’s younger sister, Angelica, wrote bitterly in her memoir ...”

“... at University College, Oxford, before he finally met W.H. Auden. It was not for want of trying. Michael, Spender’s elder brother, an insufferable turbo-brain at Balliol, had known Auden at school and kept in touch, but refused to arrange an introduction for Stephen, fearing, as Spender later put it, that ‘in producing me he would be playing the weakest ...”

“... this alignment between deconstruction and a radical critique of existing political discourse. Michael Ryan has an essay on the inbuilt contradictions of liberal reason, arguing that we need a different epistemology – an alternative idea of language, politics and truth – in order to grasp and transcend these antinomies. The trouble with this ...”

“... authorities than the force commander in Mogadishu – they came from Centcom HQ in Florida and the White House itself. The charge sheet for any inquiry into Mogadishu war crimes might contain the names of some very high-ranking American individuals. The International Committee of the Red Cross (ICRC) is roundly in favour of an International Criminal Court. But ...”

“... heads and demanded that we renounce Christ. When we got home from school, our flickering black and white televisions escalated the Communophobic barrage. The FBI Story, a weekly drama, competed in unmasking disloyalty with the real House Un-American Activities Committee and its Senate equivalent under Joe McCarthy. Commies, loners and eggheads were undermining ...”

“... of looks and talent: as though she’d decided to abandon the American dream and reverted to being white trash.In the mid-2000s the celebrity gossip machine was hitting peak efficiency, with a clutch of new weekly magazines followed by digital arrivistes such as TMZ, a rolling news website fed by a network of LA tipsters, and bloggers like Perez Hilton, a ...”

“... Rocket Man turned to diplomacy. In December, Kim ascended the sacred mountain of Paektu on a white horse, symbolic of a man contemplating a mighty decision. In his 2018 New Year message, he announced that a North Korean delegation was to take part in South Korea’s Winter Olympics. That spring, he met the South Korean president, Moon Jae-in, and made it ...”

“... the Germans were in full murder mode. Historical information and interpretation, based largely on Michael Marrus and Robert Paxton’s Vichy France and the Jews, have also been added. The 2503 photographs themselves: these have been reproduced from identity cards and gravestones, from formal studio portraits and intimate snapshots, from school, camp and ...”

“... as it happens – and face down apartheid (Carter was a dyed-in-the-wool anti-racist). In the White House, with the new national security adviser, Zbigniew Brzezinski, at his shoulder, he set all this aside. His administration was as hostile to the MPLA as Ford’s had been. Shunned by the new figure in the White House ...”

“... form. Opposite views of the problem are taken in two contributions, but with arguments in neither. Michael Daniel and Dmitry Ganenkov review the wealth of cases in the languages of Daghestan; Peter Arkadiev considers languages with just two cases, after which other contributors focus attention on particular languages or language groups, including Ik (Christa ...”

“... appears at the start of the novel’s second chapter: Detective Ali Lateef – born Rufus Lamarck White – enjoyed anagrams, acrostic poems, palindromic brainteasers, and any cipher that could be broken with basic algebra. When casework was slow he amused himself by inventing simple alphabets, usually of the phonogrammic type, and using them to post ...”

“... It’s hard to know how seriously Chandler took these musings. On top of being a relapse-prone white-knuckle drunk, he was a lonely man who preferred the mail to company and took pains to make his letters entertainingly cantankerous. Still, it’s clear that he had trouble reconciling the clean-limbed notions of ‘romance’ he’d absorbed in his youth ...”

“... supported the same football teams, and wore the same aftershave. Meanwhile, Adam Ant painted a white stripe across his face and sported more lip gloss than Madonna.Transgression isn’t for everyone, but it tempts the future. A lot of the electronic bands of that period dealt in a kind of transgressive yearning, seeming to feel homesick for somewhere that ...”

“... designed by Mies van der Rohe, curtains by Ben Nicholson, sculptures by Barbara Hepworth, a white skin sofa. A temporarily unirascible Geoffrey Grigson found their home ‘a place of parties, of extraordinary entertainment’, where one might meet Braque or Helion, the Nicholsons and the Moores, some of the artistic refugees from Hitler’s ...”

“... and reducing her, at least temporarily, to a meekly spousal role. Graves, for whom Riding was the White Goddess – ‘she was his muse and he loved her and abandoned himself to her,’ as one of the other disciples touchingly remarked towards the end – would have been horrified by such an outcome. But perhaps she secretly hankered for such a ...”