“... in its hand. Adie’s story runs in parallel with the account of a half-Iranian American held captive in – where else – an empty white room in Beirut. Lacking digital crayons or toolkit, he fills his blank space with imagination. Why, one wonders, did Powers settle on 1989 as his historical setting? It was, of course, the year he got his ...”

“... is dead. There are many distinguished analytic philosophers, particularly admirers of Kripke like David Lewis and Frank Jackson, who are unabashed physicalist metaphysicians. They think of themselves as continuing the struggle against mystificatory nonsense that Thomas Huxley waged against Bishop Wilberforce, Russell against Bergson, and Carnap against ...”

“... no intention of allowing negotiations about these matters (with the exception of the abortive Camp David-Taba episode, they haven’t been allowed at any time in the past 15 years). Sharon’s plans are predicated on no negotiations with the Palestinians, because any Palestinian negotiators, however feeble, would object to Sharon’s stated aim of establishing ...”

“... and his most willing slave.In the second volume, there is more space for villains as Mary is held in many damp castles. There are new rules at every move, plus plots, counterplots and torture. Mary suffers despair and writes many appeals. Bess of Hardwick and Paulet are among her tormentors. It is clear how the story will end; Plaidy writes with the same ...”

“... Brigaders, Trotskyites, Communists, pacifists failed by their tribunals. The playwright David Hare declared recently that working-class conscripts now met ‘the officer class’ for the first time and rebelled; but plenty had met the people issuing orders, at least since Peterloo. Moreover, an Army largely unemployed except in training or retreat ...”

“... join us in Jerusalem.’ The older soldier ordered the demonstrators to disperse, but they held their ground. Over the next ten minutes, they pushed the soldiers back about a hundred feet to the concrete barriers through which cars must twist and turn to clear the checkpoint. There they stopped. Some of them sat in the road and chanted: ‘No ...”

“... progressive, and in favour of freedom, though less often at the barrel of a gun, at least a gun held by an American soldier. One of Whipple’s key sources is Antony Blinken, a habitual punner who plays guitar in a DC cover band called Coalition of the Willing, specialising in tunes by the Stones and Clapton. Blinken has worked for Biden on and off since ...”

“... the British medievalist T.F. Tout, who taught at the University of Manchester, where Fawtier had held a lectureship for five years after the First World War. Tout was known for the Ford Lectures he had delivered in Oxford in 1913 on the reign of Edward II, and above all for his six-volume Chapters in the Administrative History of Medieval England. Fawtier ...”

“... as if he were swimming down to land, but kept safe in his mother’s clutch. In the other hand she held the sort of small, shabby suitcase that pulp fiction illustrators give to people running away from their lives – to heroines with gumption, or plausibly handsome yet morally flawed young men. The suitcase holds the protagonists’ future. The man uses his ...”

“... then on to Malawi and Zimbabwe, in November 1991, will underestimate the hardiness and courage of David Livingstone, who traversed, on foot, thousands of miles of bush, mountain and swamp, fearsome to behold even from the air. But Livingstone’s country had not been unknown to the Portuguese, established on both east and west coast for centuries. The term ...”

“... a suspended sentence for sexually assaulting two women on set in 2021). The festival leadership held crisis meetings and was readying to remove the films of the offending directors and actors from the programme when it was revealed that the list was a scam, created by a far-right account on X. Protests and symbols of protest are banned from the red carpet ...”

“... rode into Vienna in an open Mercedes, lifting and lowering his right arm while his left hand ‘held tight to his belt buckle’, as Gregor von Rezzori wrote in Cain, ‘as though he were afraid that his pants might fall down’. This being the age of balcony politics, Hitler appeared on one to announce the Anschluss, the ‘joining’ of Austria to the ...”

“... The fact that he was white, like several other major West Coast jazz musicians, was not generally held against him. Astonishing to discover, especially given how few people outside music know much about him now, that he came second after Charlie Parker in a 1951 Down Beat readers’ poll for Best Alto Sax Player Ever. Even the most partisan Bird-fanciers ...”

“... a painting before, or a piece of sculpture. In 1971 there was work there in my school holidays. I held a light from the wings on a production of Murder in the Cathedral. I remember vividly shining it on the actresses in the chorus as they chanted: Does the bird sing in the south? Only the sea bird cries Driven inland by the storm. What sign of the spring of ...”

“... farmers who sold up and took what capital they could with them. ‘From the famine onwards,’ David Fitzpatrick writes, ‘male and female emigrants were quite evenly balanced. Boys and girls alike swarmed out of every parish, every social stratum, and almost every household, systematically thinning out the fabric of Irish society.’About a million ...”