“... to the Vatican, can’t be happy. These last two, according to the New York Times, went to a ball in Rome ahead of the conclave with various right-wing European politicians. Most of those present supported a Hungarian cardinal called Peter Erdo. ‘He’s what we need right now,’ Tim Busch, president of the conservative Napa Institute in ...”

“... firing standard steel balls into London telephone directories. According to the page at which a ball had stopped they could calculate how much energy it had lost when penetrating the target. They went from telephone books to human flesh, borrowing what Zuckerman called ‘anatomical material taken from, and returned to, a hospital post-mortem room’. The ...”

“... and being swanky, at the Ritz. But I really like the first part best.’ In a photo taken at a ball in March, Roselyne Béghin, of the sugar fortune, and Sabine de Noailles, whose aunt’s grandmother inspired Proust, are caught mid-chat, eyes closed and mouths open in exclamation, but Bouvier, in a black strapless dress and triple-stranded pearls, manages ...”

“... as it emerged. An official suggested why Frishman was so useful to the government: ‘He played ball the most’ with his captors, ‘and therefore was the most torn.’ He’d stabbed himself in the back, and was ready to do his penance. By the time Fonda visited pows in Hanoi in 1972, many more were ‘playing ...”

“... secretary of education; Jeane Kirkpatrick, the former UN ambassador; and the influential columnist George Will are also steadfast supporters. The US form of government offers activists many ways of influencing the policy process. Interest groups can lobby elected representatives and members of the executive branch, make campaign contributions, vote in ...”

“... a haunted history stretching from 1774 to the present: the author, Jean Stein, and her co-editor, George Plimpton, of the Paris Review, acknowledge the familial dimension by providing a ‘genealogy of principal characters’ near the end of the book. The founding father was Judge Theodore Sedgwick who came to Stockbridge ‘after the Revolution’, and who ...”

“... positioned himself more precisely on the cusp between common sense and scientific expertise than George Cheyne. Born in Aberdeenshire in 1671, and trained at the rising medical school of Edinburgh, Cheyne in 1702 sought his fortune in the seething medical marketplace of London. The metropolis then was, as Roy Porter has said, ‘a world of quacks’. It was ...”

“... The much gossiped about George Eliot absolutely hated the idea of people talking behind their hands. The year she took up with a married man was also the year Ruskin’s wife revealed her husband’s impotence during court proceedings. ‘Gossip is a sort of smoke that comes from the dirty tobacco-pipes of those who diffuse it,’ Eliot wrote ironically in Daniel Deronda ...”

“... father was persuaded to use on his patients a round lead object about the size of a bowling ball encased in leather. The procedure for promoting peristalsis was to lie the patient flat on his bed and roll the ball clockwise around the abdomen, following the course of the colon. Old Dr Thomas was disappointed in its ...”

“... with weariness, ready to drift away into a sensual stupor, like a whore coming out of a masked ball, snoozing in her carriage, so tipsy that the cushions feel soft, reassured by the sight of the gendarmes on the street with their sabres, protecting her from the urchins who might hoot insults at her.Republic or monarchy, we won’t get beyond all that for ...”

“... Intelligence of the British Fascists, to head its counter-subversion unit, and in 1927 sent Joseph Ball, who had been conducting black propaganda against the Labour Party, to become Director of Publicity at Conservative Central Office. A secret service diaspora was thus created whose influence is still being felt. Chronology alone is not sufficient to unpick ...”

“... of this animate inventory that makes Winogrand so important. Taking his lead from Georg Lukács, George Steiner wrote of Balzac that when he ‘describes a hat, he does so because a man is wearing it.’ Granted, in photography hats are forever being verbed – worn, carried, tipped – but it’s helpful to see Winogrand as a visual novelist whose work was ...”

“... had made. Kleinzahler was born in 1949 and grew up in Fort Lee, New Jersey, just across from the George Washington Bridge. He went to college in Wisconsin, but dropped out and drifted a while, before enrolling at the University of Victoria in British Columbia, where his favourite 20th-century poet, Basil Bunting, happened to be teaching that year. Afterwards ...”

“... Wear. Her body was found the next morning in the derelict Old Exchange Building. In 1993, one man, George Heron, had been acquitted of her murder; now another, David Boyd, was about to stand trial.In 1992, Sunderland’s shipyards had closed down, Monkwearmouth colliery was about to be mothballed and, though Liebherr cranes still tilted their long necks across ...”

“... to bear on Britain, in early 1954 Makarios met secretly with a retired colonel of the Greek army, George Grivas, to plan a guerrilla campaign to liberate the island. Even by the standards of the Greek right, not fastidious in its choice of men or means, Grivas was a nervi on the extreme wing of counter-revolution. A veteran of the disastrous Greek thrust into ...”