“... times prime minister of Great Britain and Ireland, died of a cancer of the palate on the 19th of May 1898. Ascension Day. It was fitting, Bill’s father said, for a Christian gentleman. It was at moments like these, he thought, when you could detect a pattern in the world. Now they were travelling to stand with the crowds and bear witness at Mr ...”

“... their minds. In the post-truth world, being right isn’t as important as being believed. It may be that in twenty years’ time, the impartiality requirement that comes with the licence fee will look anachronistic because it will have become imperative to answer the tribal television news networks such as Fox News with rival tribal television ...”

“... Trump replied. “It’s all bullshit.”’ Woodward is repeating himself here, which means he may have got his notes muddled up. What’s more likely is that everyone was just saying the same thing over and over again. Trump wanted to bring the money home, especially from South Korea. In desperation, Cohn asked him emolliently: ‘So, Mr President, what ...”

“... punishments against which it is fighting today. A local paper in Texas informed its readers on 6 May 1922 that, after a thrilling manhunt, ‘three coloured men were burned here at dawn for the murder of Eula Ausley, pretty 17-year-old schoolgirl.’ The men – McKinley Curry, Johnny Cornish and Mose Jones – inconveniently delayed the proceedings by ...”

“... right-wing fanatic in February 1919 and the Bavarian revolution began to disintegrate. It ended in May, when counter-revolutionary troops under Noske’s orders stormed Munich with artillery and bombing aircraft. A ‘White Terror’ followed, worse than anything seen in Berlin.In the same month, the Versailles peace terms were published. Hopeful fantasies ...”

“... a pillow’. Kauffman, whose large classical scenes are evidence of her mastery of the human form, may have studied statuary, plaster casts, other artists’ drawings or, as later rumour had it, an obliging male model, Charles Cranmer – who claimed that he visited her house to sit, with her father present, chastely ‘expos[ing] his arms, shoulders and ...”

“... preferably after revisions. He also noted that he found the second section quite boring. It may not be a coincidence that this is easily the most ‘Durassian’ part of the book. After his uncle’s death, Nicolas takes up with a local woman. When she tires of him, he kills himself by lying down in front of a train. Exhausted by farm work, and ...”

“... pressure, forced Israel to withdraw, leaving the majority of its local collaborators behind.On 25 May 2000, tens of thousands of Lebanese – Christians, Druze and Sunnis as well as Shia – poured into the south in a day of celebration, many returning to their villages for the first time since the occupation began. Israel had never before abandoned occupied ...”

“... new comic style was called ‘stand-up’, a term whose very name suggested immobility.Low comedy may have been lost by then to popular American entertainment, but it had been found as high art by the international theatrical avant-garde. The model for Antonin Artaud’s Theatre of Cruelty turned out to be the Marx Brothers and their ‘hymn to ...”

“... to become extremely homosocial). Indeed, although in most parts of the West ‘coming out’ may now be easier than it has ever been, there seems to be a renewed enthusiasm for publishing narratives about the discovery and affirmation of our identity. But we should recognise that the long, largely undetected influence of the case study has also kept gay ...”

“... liked turn-ups on trousers, and I was the best-dressed boy in boarding school (not the bonus it may sound like when you want to fit in). The French for ‘turn-up’ is revers – reversal, or inside-out. So many variations of doubleness and overlapping, inner and outer, spoken and unspoken, borders and their crossings, reversals and inversions. I now take ...”

“... prescription is clarity. Language records our predicament, but is also the means by which we may worsen or remedy it. He admires writers who force their language into weird contemporary shapes (Joyce, Pound, Gadda), but his solution is Kafka’s: ‘to speak of the intricate tangle of our situation using a language so seemingly transparent that it ...”

“... previously used several pseudonyms to hide his socialist agitating from employers). ‘It may be that man is manipulable,’ he wrote, ‘or that elements of nature are manipulable … but ecology clearly shows that the totality of the natural world – nature taken in all its aspects, cycles and inter-relationships – cancels out all human ...”

“... in time for the events of 1968 thanks to Kaminsky’s artistry – ‘my only contribution to the May revolt’, Kaminsky said. (It was also a ‘gag’, he explained in his interview with Adler: it was the only time he made papers for someone who wasn’t in immediate danger.) He forged passports for Mexican activists after the 1968 student massacre, and for ...”

“... New features could be introduced without any sense of anachronism, rather as a new picture may be hung in an old house. ‘Britain’ itself was still a semi-mythic construct, supposedly the creation of the Trojan ‘Brut’, descendant of Aeneas, and Brindle keeps the particularities of Scotland and Ireland in view. Scotland, though it would have its ...”