“... met in Cambridge, and to his great chagrin was ‘arbitrarily expelled’ from the Soviet Union in May 1964 and not readmitted for 24 years.I met Peter a few months after this, shortly after my own arrival as a raw graduate student from Australia. He was very kind to me. He told me that all Russians have two faces, the conformist one you first see, which is a ...”

“... today,’ he wrote when Governor Eyre declared martial law during the Morant Bay rebellion, ‘may be done in Ireland tomorrow and England hereafter.’ Edward Beesly, a member of the parliamentary Jamaica Committee, compared the rebellion to the Hyde Park demonstrations in support of universal male suffrage in 1866, and concluded that Harrison’s ...”

“... in 1999, David Bellos points out that less than three years before he began shooting the film (in May 1947) the Gestapo still had an office on the main square of Sainte-Sévère. And now American movies and military policemen are the problem?Many of the best scenes in Jour de fête are a homage to Buster Keaton, who had developed a technique unfamiliar, for ...”

“... attorney general, talked about running for governor in 2016. He died on the evening of 30 May 2015. His last words were ‘beautiful, beautiful’, which is at least as plausible as Steve Jobs’s last word being ‘Wow!’ At the funeral Obama delivered a speech, Chris Martin of Coldplay sang ‘Til Kingdom Come’, and Beau and Hunter’s ...”

“... remained ‘intrinsically … boring and dangerous at the same time. At any given moment the floor may open up. Of course, it almost never does; that’s what makes it so boring.’The child can also wreak reciprocal havoc on the bewildering world, as happens in one of Gorey’s earliest books, The Doubtful Guest (1957), a story told in monochrome ...”

“... buildings vanished and half-finished new ones loomed, with drama and precision. Cock, by contrast, may not have visited Rome, though the title of his first series of Roman prints claimed that they rested on first-hand observation. What matters most, for Stewart, are the preoccupations they shared. Both were fascinated by violence itself, she argues, as well as ...”

“... master and my author’ just to make a point about the necessity of baptism? The answer may seem obvious until we note that several righteous pagans are in fact saved. Two of them, Ripheus and the emperor Trajan, inhabit the sphere of Justice in the Paradiso. A popular legend held that Gregory the Great, bewailing Trajan’s damnation, secured a ...”

“... a tree in bloom and birds screeching outside the window of my boardinghouse on the Aventino in May; in another part of Rome, a boardinghouse with a dark, frozen corridor like the hallway in my childhood home.Seeing her lover from a certain angle suddenly takes her back, only now with the thought that the dining-room table, ‘instead of being a thing of ...”

“... do. The myth persists that decolonisation after 1945 was a dignified, planned process. Its advance may have been jostled by the impatience of half-educated agitators, but the empire’s intention had always been to lead all its territories and races towards ‘responsible self-government’ and – conceivably – to independence.Such nonsense! It’s still ...”

“... for that project, Herzog stands beside Chatwin’s leather rucksack, the gift of a dying man. In May 2018, a group of 48 filmmakers were invited to join Herzog at a workshop where they would ‘submerge into the density and mystery of the Peruvian Amazonian jungle’. They would travel ‘exclusively in motorboat’. Jungle tourism caters for all tastes, as ...”

“... also noted that ‘this objective is not formally stated in public documents.’) In May 2003, Jonathan Eyal, now associate director at RUSI, complained that ‘persuading international public opinion that a military action against Iraq was necessary should have been easy.’ But for some reason, even within the Anglosphere large numbers of ...”

“... could approach by manipulating or kneading the reality and the living men who comprised it. Djilas may have recognised bits of himself in Stalin: in particular, the ‘final ideals’ behind the restless realism. ‘Because the true fanatical fervour was so clearly recognisable behind his cynicism,’ a Swiss journalist wrote years later, at the height of ...”

“... certainly isn’t the kind of remark Oedipus was ever allowed to make: previous tragic characters may have spoken of funerals, but they didn’t mention the cost of the catering or implicitly liken their remarried mothers to a meat dish inappropriately served twice. In Ivano-Frankivsk, as elsewhere when this play is done well, Hamlet’s line achieved a ...”

“... all members of the imperial family, he was raised a Christian. Following Constantine’s death in May 337, the six-year-old Julian was overlooked in the dynastic butchery that eliminated his father and other blood rivals of Constantine’s son and successor, Constantius II. Excluded from his cousin’s court, Julian grew up far away on an estate near Caesarea ...”

“... hydrangea); and his need for his unconscious to have its way involves an ambivalence about what it may bring home (the dreams about his dog – restitution, or nightmare?). Ammons was raised in a house that had hardly any books. All he could remember reading were the first 11 pages of Robinson Crusoe – the rest of the book had disappeared. That memory is ...”