“... the worst possible advertisement for such treatment. He was extremely intelligent. Leaving aside Henry VIII, Charles II and William III, he was perhaps our cleverest King since the Middle Ages. He had polished manners, and was also musical, a lover of literature and a patron of the arts. But there his virtues ended. He was selfish, idle, self-pitying, cruel ...”

“... sounds like the title of a novel, and the book isn’t without its literary qualities. Parsing Henry Kissinger’s memoirs, Feeney notes that he ‘presents himself as a sort of Germanic Jeeves, unflappable and long-suffering, who again and again saves the day for his maladroit employer, a malevolent, egregiously Middle American Bertie ...”

“... their appointment bowed to the logic that would soon be spelled out by the republican theorist James Harrington, who remarked that England could be governed only through a nobility or an army. The traditional intermediaries between the Government and the shires, the Lords Lieutenant, had succumbed to the pressures of the Puritan Revolution, and so military ...”

“... various reasons for the decision including the fact that ‘political satire became obsolete when Henry Kissinger was awarded the Nobel Peace Prize.’ Lehrer’s work is sometimes Swiftian in its darkness and Parr emphasises that it was this that inspired him. Humour not photography was his first passion. ‘I studied humour very carefully from a very early ...”

“... variety of causes, in which the common theme has been a desire to take on the evil-doers, from Henry Kissinger to Mother Teresa to Bill Clinton to Saddam Hussein. The United States is a great country for political romantics because there is always something going on. There are almost limitless occasions on which to display yourself. But what’s wrong with ...”

“... In the post-war world it did not start like that, although appearances were unpromising. When Henry Truman became President on the death of Roosevelt in 1945, it was customary to laugh at him. It was said that the United States had exalted the common, ordinary man, and that they were now landed with one as their leader. But the critics were confounded as ...”

“... bin Laden’s hideout under torture. ‘A racist society can’t but fight a racist war,’ James Baldwin wrote in 1967, ‘the assumptions acted on at home are also acted on abroad.’ During the war on terror the traffic between the US and various shithole countries wasn’t only in assumptions: there was also a wholesale exporting of ...”

“... is free.’ But Padmore wasn’t in the mood to celebrate. Much to their surprise, as Leslie James recounts in George Padmore and Decolonisation from Below (2014), Padmore and Pizer had found themselves flying to Ghana ‘on a VIP plane with former British governors, the British parliamentary delegation, the Norwegian ambassador and delegations from ...”

“... turned out to be an abortive attempt to raise an 11-ton section of the hull. The movie director James Cameron, fascinated with what he called the Everest of wrecks, filmed a dive that became part of his blockbuster 1997 movie (the footage was recently repurposed for a documentary). The new 3D version of the movie released in time for the centenary took its ...”

“... isn’t like that,’ they’re off the hook. 20 February. We’re gradually assembling a class: James Corden, who’s plump and funny and at the audition entirely takes charge; Sacha Dhawan, an Asian boy from Manchester who complains that all he’s ever offered these days are Muslim terrorists or Afghan refugees; Jamie Parker, who is to play Scripps the ...”

“... In his quirky but compelling book on Burke, The Great Melody, Conor Cruise O’Brien fingers James Mill in his History of British India as one of the first to put the knife in. On the question of India, Mill says, Burke neither stretched his eye to the whole of the subject, nor did he carry its vision to the bottom. He was afraid. He was not a man to ...”

“... and Young’s sociology), in the messy, chaotic work of Eduardo Paolozzi and Art Brut (‘Fuck Henry Moore’ was one slogan), in vernacular architecture, in industrial buildings, and in Hollywood films and advertising. Their buildings were meant to be noisy; for Banham, exemplars include Lasdun’s ‘Cluster Block’ at Keeling House in Bethnal ...”

“... on the abuses that made the Middle Passage particularly grim.Adopting the syntax of Milton and James Thomson, language associated at this date with ideas of liberty, he entangles the reader with the ‘groans, and loud laments’ heard on slave ships and reports that                                            female shrieks,At ...”

“... her, it seems, without a biddyish dilation on the carnality of her themes. ‘Maude Hutchins,’ James Kelly wrote in 1955, does ‘as she pleases’ as a novelist and ‘to date what has pleased her most is s-e-x as observed and enjoyed from the feminine vantage point.’ Hutchins, Maxwell Geismar said, was a writer who went about ‘describing casually all ...”

“... Lorna Finlayson, Daniel Finn, Katrina Forrester, Jeremy Harding, Daisy Hildyard, Colin Kidd, James Meek, Ferdinand Mount, Jan-Werner Müller, Jonathan Parry, David RuncimanNeal Ascherson‘On​ 17 June poor France fell. That day, as we trudged past Greenwich … a tug skipper yelled gaily across the water: “Now we know where we are! No more bloody ...”