“... on air tickets beyond that, free airport parking etc. Thabo Mbeki’s irritation with the press may have something to do with the coverage the refurbishment of his two vice-presidential mansions has elicited: rather than use the stairs to go up to his first floor, as ordinary mortals do, he has decided that he must, at vast public expense, install ...”

“... what pushed him over the top was the extraordinary quantity of pink gin he drank. Of course, there may have been other more private incitements to mania. Threading my way past the card parties, I eventually found the wardroom, actually a passenger saloon on the upper deck, designated ‘wardroom’ by a freshly painted sign, still unfinished and no doubt ...”

“... new self; the blindness that is true vision. The obsession with seeing, with darkness and light, may well have had its roots in the grim, coal-black inversion of life in the Nottinghamshire of Lawrence’s childhood. The life of the miner was a life of seeing in the darkness, and of emerging (in winter, at least) from underground at nightfall. Lawrence’s ...”

“... ideals of the Republic. Goldgar rightly argues that the historian reconstructing an organisation may find its malfunctions more informative, in crucial respects, than its blueprints. But Goldgar also argues that many debates proved impossible to resolve. Even within the world Of the Huguenots, disagreement raged – for example, on whether local churches had ...”

“... the one hand, and on the other, an art addressed to the commodity and its spectacularisation. It may not be going too far to view this as the delayed victory of those Constructivist and Dada tendencies which earlier challenged Modernism as part of what proved to be the historically premature revolution of the early 20th century. Shorn of the revolutionary ...”

“... dans la rue, ou dans le rêve’. Though Cornell separated himself from the Surrealists, it may be that he beat them, however unintentionally, at their own game. While he was cutting out constellation maps to line his boxes, he was also tracing his own constellations in his favourite routes around the Manhattan grid. As he was thinking of ways to make ...”

“... the Revolution was taking. He attempted to call its bluff by painting insurgent peons and thronged May Day meetings, enjoying the outrage the pictures caused. With Siqueiros and Xavier Guerrero he also founded the famously belligerent Sindicato (Union of Workers, Technicians, Painters and Sculptors), an early example of the syndicates, leagues and blocs that ...”

“... him, you’d find panic and emptiness in the middle’, which Strouse wouldn’t say of Morgan. He may lack any very complicated internal life, or the means of expressing it, but his story is neither empty nor dispiriting. His was a life of things and acts; feelings are recounted in the biography – depressions, infatuations, rages – but with a ...”

“... the reconstruction of a narrative that (in terms of cause, event and effect) is as truthful as may be. He has made full use of Froissart and many other chroniclers, but his principal sources are the records that survive: of taxation, of payments made, of musters, of appointments to command and of instructions to negotiators, together with ...”

“... fear death?’ he was heard to say. ‘It is the most beautiful adventure in life.’ He may have been echoing J.M. Barrie, whose ‘awfully big adventure’ had only recently chimed with children of all ages. But the immediate circumstances – shipwreck, showmanship, early death – also bring to mind the life and career of Robert Louis ...”

“... preposterous contraption of regeneration, whereby at moments of dire depletion, the Doctor may collapse, shimmer a bit and re-emerge shortly afterwards, in the body and person of someone new. Audience figures were nothing special to begin with. But it turned out that the show’s young producer, Verity Lambert, had ignored her boss’s instructions ...”

“... for ethical reasons is both a political action and a retreat from politics. Ethical consumption may indeed be the best we can do, and it gives the ethical consumer a nice warm glow, but it is also another form of self-expression through consumption, and it is consumption, at root, which is the problem. At a global level, you could say that choosing not to ...”

“... is down to the fact that he has been off training with an injury for a couple of months. This may be so; but the truth is he if anything looks a bit thinner than he has done playing for Real Madrid in the last couple of seasons. I think he’s a bit porky for no other reason than that he likes his pies. I also think there is something noble about a ...”

“... when we have invented plastic, and the doll’s head with her tufts of hair and rolling eyes may well persist after our own have cleaned back down to bone. It was Martin who gave me the gannet’s skull. We had moved to the island of Scarp, and though he had found the bird bones on Ceann Iar, he chose this moment to produce them, with mock-ceremony, from ...”

“... first time I ever really felt myself as an American.’ But she didn’t fully feel American. This may be the reason Festac’s projection of itself as representative of a ‘pan-African nation’ was so attractive to her. She didn’t feel separate from the people she photographed:I was part of the whole thing. I don’t call it capturing an image. I don’t ...”