“... One of Melania’s former friends, Stephanie Winston Wolkoff, has speculated that Melania may have helped her sister too. In her memoir Melania and Me: The Rise and Fall of My Friendship with the First Lady (2020), Wolkoff recounts that in 2012, Melania ‘asked me to write a letter on behalf of her sister, Ines’ (about whom almost nothing is ...”

“... The law no longer allowed judges to use torture as part of their questioning – something that may have emboldened Thiess in giving his testimony. They heard that the pastor had warned him off his ‘devilish deeds’ before, describing the everlasting punishment he would receive. Thiess had agreed to stop – it was necessary if he was to be allowed to ...”

“... burned by the Parlement of Paris (which turbocharged sales).When Voltaire arrived in London in May 1726 (‘without a penny, sick to death of a violent ague, a stranger, alone, helpless’, he told a correspondent in his newly mastered English), he was fresh from a spectacular feud with the Chevalier de Rohan-Chabot, a powerful aristocrat, which had landed ...”

“... were eighty kilometres away. Life got back on its feet and adjusted to new circumstances.‘We may periodically forget the war,’ he went on, ‘but the war will, every so often, remind us of its existence.’What might seem a diversion from war often turns out to have war as its subject, or to intersect with war. I went to a concert at the Ukrainian ...”

“... Godoy, Queen Maria Luisa’s lover; the heir to the throne Fernando plotted against them all). In May 1808, Napoleon summoned the king and his rebellious heir to Bayonne, where he forced them both to abdicate in favour of his own brother Joseph. He counted on his troops already in the Peninsula to enforce the transition, but faced insurrections in numerous ...”

“... of a criminal gang that was supposedly dealing in stolen church artefacts. But Father Mario may also have owed his freedom to the intervention of Jean Arnault, the head of MINUGUA, the UN mission in Guatemala. Two days after the priest was formally charged in October 1998, Arnault gave a press conference. ‘We know that groups exist,’ he ...”

“... the place whereon thou standest is holy ground’. But Ora Horn Prouser says that the command ‘may simply appear to be about holiness’ when, actually, it defines the nature of the relationship between God and the Israelites. Captives are kept barefoot, and David fled barefooted from his son Absalom. Subjugation and unreadiness, therefore, are ...”

“... forget,’ Melcher once told a reporter, ‘she is always the victim.’ Doris’s husband may have engineered every aspect of her celebrity, keeping her on a production treadmill, churning out movies at a startling rate, but he was also her protector, keeping her separate from the business of crafting her persona. ‘I wasn’t too sure about being in ...”

“... to upgrade bases, roads and telecommunications. After Osama left Saudi Arabia for the last time in May 1991, he followed the well-worn path of the ‘semi-independent bin Laden brothers’ by starting ventures of his own in and around Khartoum: the bin Laden organisation won the contract to build a new Saudi-funded airport in Sudan. King Fahd ordered Bakr to ...”

“... than the vaguest chimera, but Goldman’s appeal, her ability to mesmerise as well as terrify, may have had something to do with that elusive ...”

“... thought that Britain was the last country that should be pillorying Mugabe, however awful he may be, in view of its past relations with his country); and if Africans could come to regard ‘transparency, honesty and accountability’ as just as much African values – they will certainly have some African precedents – as ‘Western’ ones. You can’t ...”

“... no one does. Yet few can afford a photovoltaic cell of their own, and that’s a pity. Conditions may be ripe for a renaissance of environmental technology, but it won’t be possible to order it from a catalogue. Barack Obama, caught on tape during a debate-prep session last year, identified the need for a collective solution: ‘We can’t solve global ...”

“... lacking duty, Neither regarding that she is my child Nor fearing me as if I were her father. And may I say to thee, this pride of hers Upon advice hath drawn my love from her, And where I thought the remnant of mine age Should have been cherished by her child-like duty, I … turn her out to who will take her in. Then let her beauty be her wedding dower ...”

“... Sam . . . who only wanted to kiss the throats of women, and who only wanted peace’. Sam may be ridiculously self-obsessed but we tuck him in and turn off the light. Keith’s summer job means he ends up meeting his intellectual hero, Morris Binkel. Keith wants Binkel to say he sees something in him. What he does say is: ‘Even the most mediocre ...”