“... because this is the Brando we have mostly seen on screen since Apocalypse Now: in A Dry White Season (1989), for example, where he plays a South African lawyer with a heavy stylistic debt to Charles Laughton; in Don Juan DeMarco (1995), where he plays an amiable psychologist who gets to dance with Faye Dunaway; in The Score (2001), where he plays ...”

“... Kinglake just sat there, not understanding the dialogue. ‘I was only the death’s head and white sheet with which he scared the enemy,’ Kinglake smiles, ‘I think that I played this spectral part exceedingly well.’ Dthemetri advised Kinglake to kill a guide who led them to the wrong bank of the Jordan. ‘There was something fascinating in this ...”

“... like fish and rutted like goats. Once, at the New Yorker, Joseph Mitchell came across Katharine White and Sayre’s mother, Gertrude Lynahan Sayre, snickering over a passage from Edmund Wilson’s Memoirs of Hecate County (1946) in which the narrator referred to his penis as a ‘club’. ‘His club!’ one of them exclaimed. ‘Bunny’s club,’ said the ...”

“... beneath the rifles which threaten them; or else it is a delightful young girl all in snowy white who dreams in the moonlight leaning on a broken column. I mean to say that most people see in a canvas only a subject which takes them by the throat or by the heart and they demand nothing further of the artist than a smile or a tear.’ According to Jane ...”

“... doesn’t succeed. UN forces then face the dilemma of deterrence: sending lightly armed troops in white vehicles under a tight mandate into an ongoing war is asking for trouble – as the history of the Blue Helmets in South Lebanon amply demonstrates. An honourable tradition argues that humanitarian intervention should be illegal – but can occasionally be ...”

“... When I came up – torn, filthy, and stinking – from under the capsized car, I felt the white-hot iron of joy deliciously pass through my heart! It is only once they are ‘smeared with good factory muck – plastered with metallic waste, with senseless sweat, with celestial soot’ that he and his confrères can proclaim their manifesto, and hymn ...”

“... A spirit storming in blank walls, A dirty house in a gutted world, A tatter of shadows peaked to white, Smeared with the gold of the opulent sun. My passenger pigeon poem acknowledges that the information it contains has been gleaned from the internet, but it also deploys the Sterne/Burton defence by taking in some allusions, including the ‘opulent ...”

“... for having ‘conquered America’, and thereby preparing the way for Freud’s own arrival. When William James and many other leading American intellectuals turned out to hear him speak, Freud felt that psychoanalysis had been given official recognition for the first time. ‘In Europe I felt as though I were despised,’ he was to write, ‘but over there I ...”

“... in American suits beating up a shopkeeper; beggars fighting over their pitches; beautiful White Russian bar-girls smiling at passers-by’. It struck him as ‘a magical place, a self-generating fantasy that left my own little mind far behind’. Later, after the Japanese invasion of 1937 but before the attack on Pearl Harbor in 1941 and the ...”

“... tired of people pointing to the ‘original’ of Mr Casaubon, who was sometimes said to be Robert William Mackay, a rather pedantic associate of hers at the Westminster Review, or Dr Brabant, a pretentious family man of 62 who had wooed her decades earlier. Others said he was Mark Pattison, the rector of Lincoln College, Oxford, who was busy suffocating the ...”

“... success of FDR’s celebrated ‘Fireside Chats’ – the majority of which were recorded in the White House – in creating what Jones terms a ‘sense of intimacy’. In this case, we really do need the visual record. The publicity shots show the president at his desk, a sheet of paper before him, sometimes a glass of water. On the desk stand a gaggle of ...”

“... Remember the images of Angelina Jolie walking across the stage, hand outstretched to greet William Hague at their ‘summit’ on rape as a war crime in London in 2014? It struck me then that she was being offered as a trade-off or collateral damage in the effort to bring such violence to an end. The initiative is now seen as a costly failure; the ...”

“... of acquaintance, including with the Australian painter Roy de Maistre. In his memoir, Patrick White remembers de Maistre as ‘a snob’ who ‘enjoyed a princess’:In Eccleston Street, in the de Maistre studio-salon, I met other more or less important people, among them Henry Moore, Graham Sutherland, Francis Bacon, as well as Douglas Cooper … I got ...”

“... embankment of the M8 while Keir climbs on top of her friend. To prepare him Keir spits ‘a foamy white gobful’ onto a much chewed comb and uses it to give him a centre parting. Shuggie’s first reaction is to recoil. This is very different from the way he is used to encountering the saliva of others, not charged with contempt but promoted to the status of ...”

“... she was the youngest ever female MP when she was elected in 1969 at the age of 21. The Reverend William McCrea of the DUP was elected in 1983, seeing Sinn Féin off by just 78 votes. He was renowned for being one of Westminster’s most absent MPs: he spent his time in Nashville recording religious country and western songs. A minister of Ian Paisley’s ...”