“... investigation is ‘not to place blame … This is not going to be on any permanent record, you may have to … reflect on it but that’s all. It won’t affect your career going forward.’ In any case, both the registrar and the SHO were now working at another trust so King’s couldn’t tell them to attend a meeting, or do anything. Recalling his time ...”

“... that at least I could force a smile’), Prescott and his bulimia. Cherie Blair and John Prescott may not have been the most unpopular figures of Blair’s government but they were the two who had the hardest time in the press. Both spent long stretches in the contemporary equivalent of the stocks; a scarring experience, and both of them were scarred. If we ...”

“... Put your trust in sensibility, in instinct. As a response to Matisse’s picture, these sentences may seem bizarre. To most viewers Woman with a Hat is the very epitome of the accidental and instinctive in painting. It is passionate and expressive. The hat sums up its mode. And yet Denis’s verdict, in my experience, will never entirely go away. The more one ...”

“... Rights and the Rule of Law, gave the Helsinki Commission a bleak assessment of his country in May last year. Its judicial system, he said, was worse than it had been in Soviet times while the president’s party, Nur-Otan (Light of the Fatherland), was little different from the Soviet Communist Party in the way it functioned. Two months after giving this ...”

“... stone in a peach and it must exist before one can ever begin to start thinking constructively. In May he decided to have a break and, on a friend’s recommendation, took a boat from Narragansett to Block Island. There he saw the charred remains of the Ocean View Hotel, which had once claimed to have the world’s longest bar – 101 stools – and hosted the ...”

“... that the buildings are showing signs of decay, that the seemingly vital city is crumbling and may fall apart. The speeding cars and bustling people are increasingly menacing. The story’s climax comes when Margaret finds herself unable to cross the street to get to where they are staying. Like many of Jackson’s characters, she has a moment of ...”

“... evidence that at the time was streaming into US intelligence agencies. Already by late May, the senior intelligence consultant told me, the CIA had briefed the Obama administration on al-Nusra and its work with sarin, and had sent alarming reports that another Sunni fundamentalist group active in Syria, al-Qaida in Iraq (AQI), also understood the ...”

“... present book, though clear and readable, tactful and scholarly, is a bit less streamlined. This may be because Lee has made much use of the live memories and personal archives of Fitzgerald’s children, and so is walking on eggshells in places. It has also been suggested that Fitzgerald herself may have done what she ...”

“... Seymour is willing to confess that Graves could be completely impossible. Facts matter, but they may reveal less about human beings than fictions. And if you want to get to know Graves, Goodbye to All That, despite its many inaccuracies, knocks the spots off any biography as a guide to his psychology as well as that of his class and of the generation who ...”

“... to be one. According to this logic, as long as Israel refrains from formalising annexation, it may indefinitely withhold civil rights from millions of Palestinians while offering every form of support to Israelis in the occupied territory: infrastructure for Israeli cities, towns and industrial zones in the West Bank; nature reserves; municipal ...”

“... was quickly recognised as the worst in the history of presidential debates. In a close contest, it may have done him terminal damage.Instead of blaming Kissinger for having been too clever by half in the debate prep, Ford blamed himself for being too slow-witted to do the briefing justice. Schwartz describes what happened next:Meeting with Kissinger a few days ...”

“... had known nothing about the scandal, and hadn’t read a warning memo about it sent to him in May 2014 – which was lucky, because if he had, his subsequent actions would have amounted to fraud, and he would probably have gone to prison. A good day to flake on the paperwork, Herr Winterkorn! But maybe skip the trip to Disneyland, OK?The​ other story of ...”

“... across the kingdom. Any account must be pointillist in character. The danger, however, is that we may miss the significant shapes that emerge from these myriad individual points. An extra hazard is that many of the documents have been misdated in the past and need putting in the right chronological order (Clark’s text itself has accumulated a tally of small ...”

“... fussiness and fascination, and after some of the more extended stretches chez les Guermantes it may well be with a sigh of relief that we find even the narrator himself giving up: ‘I should never get to the end of it if I began to describe all the different types of drawing-room.’ A translation must of course respect the assumptions of the original; but ...”

“... been the fate of every other government which came to power to tidy up the Communist mess. Gaidar may have been used to the world of power and influence, but none of the others, save briefly Shokhin, had climbed the long Soviet ladder to power: they had been catapulted into office at what was for a gerontocratic country a ludicrously young age. They soon ...”