“... in the region. Besides this main effort, a squadron of six warships and two supply vessels, led by Commodore George Anson, was to carry out a secret mission around Cape Horn, attacking Spanish ports on the Pacific coast and capturing one of their famed galleons full of silver en route from Mexico to the Philippines. From the outset, almost everything that ...”

“... Swift is a no-no – too fast. The Russian national anthem – too slow. There would seem to be a political subtext here, along the lines of ‘One’s just as bad as the other,’ but let it pass.Where would Arthur Russell fit on the Chechnya index? Breathless dance tracks like ‘Is It All over My Face’, ‘Go Bang!’ and ‘Kiss Me Again’ are ...”

“... noble nature was intentional. ‘Staffage’ is the word for human and animal extras, I find, and David Teniers the Younger, whose work Turner admired, is offered as the source of their plain looks. Whatever his narrative intention, foreground accents – not just people, but boats, buoys, goats, ducks – are important parts of the visual machinery. They ...”

“... conspiracy: either the unexpectedly genocidal effects of the 5G rollout were being covered up by faking a pandemic, or 5G was being used deliberately to kill huge numbers of people and help enslave whoever was left. In the actual world, 5G’s feeble radio waves aren’t capable of any of this – you’d get more radiation standing near a baby monitor ...”

“... Or was it your first sight of those 11 yellow-haired Romanians? Earlier tournaments are now known by their ‘defining moments’. In 1970, we had Moore and Pele swapping shirts; in ‘82, there was the demented Altobelli; in ‘86 the Hand of God; in ‘90, Gazza’s tears. I’m not sure what it was in ‘94: Romario and Bebeto doing that baby-cradling ...”

“... an earlier age would have ascribed to supra-natural agents like the Devil or the Antichrist) can be personified in this rather flashy Roman emperor. Even those of less apocalyptic temperament, faced by almost any legacy of the late antique world of which they disapprove – anti-Semitism, the secular power of the ...”

“... through Checkpoint 56, at the base of Shuhada Street, where the section of Hebron inhabited by Israeli settlers is sealed off from the rest of the city. All through the winter, several Palestinians were being killed every week, sometimes a few a day, most of them in Hebron or the towns and villages surrounding it. Almost without exception, the Israeli ...”

“... the bit from Ecclesiasticus about now praising famous men. Where these orders of service used to be religious brochures offering blasts of Christian devotion, they are now ‘celebrations’ of the life, posthumous animations of the career, and summaries of the person behind the personality. In the old days, they might have been organised ...”

“... In​ August 2006 I visited an architect friend called David Martin who lived near the town of Montignac in the Dordogne. He was in the middle of a complicated job converting the interior of a nearby château, which had been acquired by a wealthy Japanese client. One evening he produced a large and rather dirty wooden crate ...”

“... 26 June). They hang on either side of the more reticent Standing Female Figure, a bronze by William Turnbull, whose textured surface and swathed upright form suggests a mummified Giacometti. The pairing illustrates how unusual Cordell’s paintings were in going beyond the inhibition and deference to French and American art that mark much British ...”

“... an international symposium on waste disposal at Bosphorus University, Istanbul. This has got to be the Cinderella end of environmentalism, less cuddly than dolphins, lacking the apocalyptic quality of the hole in the ozone layer. That’s probably why they’re surprised to see me here: an accompanying wife, and a writer too. ‘What have dump sites to do ...”

“... a young male was prepared for the rites de passage from which he would emerge as a full warrior by the tuition of an older male who was his lover. Further, the American scholar David Halperin published A Hundred Years of Homosexuality (1990), a volume of essays in which he enthusiastically supports Foucault’s view that ...”

“... In Euripides’ drama Hippolytus (428 BC), when the women of Troezen learn that Phaedra, their queen, is ill, they wonder if she has been possessed by a god or whether her ‘soul’ has been bound to her bed by grief because her husband has found another woman ...”

“... Brenda.” ’ The style and address of Eric Hammond is unmistakable. He is here declining to be scared by a letter from Brenda Dean, ‘the pleasant woman at the helm of SOGAT’, trying to frighten him over EEPTU relations with Eddie Shah and Today. Hammond would eventually ...”

“... story of the Jeremy Thorpe affair’, for there is no other book that tells that story. Written by three journalists from the Sunday Times, it presents the existing state of knowledge, but tidied up and reduced to order, and with some ‘investigative’ embellishments probably added. Originality is neither claimed nor indicated, but except where inhibited ...”