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“... wrote in one of his essays for Bute. In particular, he had a clear understanding of the balance of powers, ‘where one part of the legislative body checks the other by the privilege of rejecting, both checked by the executive, as that is again by the legislative; all parts moving, and however they may follow the particular interests of their body, yet all ...”

“... there in 1878. She went to seek respite from her passionate but unconsummated love affair with Richard Doughty-Wylie (nephew of the great explorer Charles Doughty), whom she had met when he was British Consul in Konya. Doughty-Wylie was married, and was not prepared to risk his career by leaving his wife. A man with physical courage to match ...”

“... stuck to the party line of perceiving the war as a necessary and welcome clash between imperialist powers: as communists linked with Moscow, the Partisans had to look on Germany as a nominal non-aggressor as long as the Nazi-Soviet Pact held. It was only when Hitler invaded the Soviet Union in 1941 that their position became free of ambiguity. But by then they ...”

“... life. He became the bosom companion (and, later, biographer) of the squalid and glamorous poet Richard Savage. At night, ‘in high spirits and brimful of patriotism’, they walked the streets together, denouncing ministerial corruption and vowing to stand by their country. Savage’s licentiousness, Boswell reported, may have led his protégé ‘into ...”

“... play of the early 1580s about an exiled courtier who lives in a cave and exercises magical powers derived from his books. The plots of the late plays revert nakedly towards fairy tale, in ways Ben Jonson, for one, found embarrassing: in 1614, in the induction to Bartholomew Fair, Jonson promised that his play would not include a ...”

“... ever have occurred to us, had we not learned them from TV? Some years ago, I met the photographer Richard Avedon when he came to take a group portrait of some Scottish writers in a Glasgow bar. By chance, I had recently been to see his retrospective exhibition, Evidence, at the National Portrait Gallery, and had become almost obsessed by the series of ...”

“... with charm) is particularly striking. Johnston ticks off ‘undergraduate atheists’ like Richard Dawkins and Christopher Hitchens, who have doubtless noticed this correlation, and scolds them for their errors about Spinoza, but I find Dawkins and Hitchens (and Sam Harris) companionable, as I find Johnston himself, and feel no resultant ...”

“... gives short shrift to this larger story, and misses how remarkable it was that these two imperial powers, in the middle of the Second World War, agreed to rewrite the rules of global capitalism to make the world safe for the interventionist Keynesian state. The convocation of the United Nations Monetary and Financial Conference, where the Keynes-White deal ...”

“... specialists out of the policy-making process. Wills gives the example of the Bay of Pigs, when Richard Bissell, the head of the CIA’s Directorate of Plans, kept his plan to invade Cuba from the CIA’s own experts. Wills also says that ‘nominally’ subordinate executive branch agencies kept important security information from the ...”

“... You​ don’t need the detective powers of George Smiley, or a conspiratorial mindset, to divine that something odd is going on behind the scenes of Adam Sisman’s new biography of John le Carré. In the past, would-be biographers have been discouraged from poking their noses into the business of David Cornwell, the former spy who has written under that curious pseudonym since 1961 ...”

“... watched their tongues when he was around. The rest, if they thought about it, imagined ‘Richard’ probably had to sign some nasty piece of paper in order to get out of Poland: so bloody what? After reading Domosławski’s compelling, exhaustive and often upsetting book, their easy tolerance – like mine – begins to look different. In the first ...”

“... and there is no court of appeal in the French text. As Prendergast puts it, ‘no one has monopoly powers over the “correct”.’ We can prefer one version to another, but then we are choosing one understanding over another: either (mostly) the understanding we ourselves have, or (better) an understanding we hadn’t thought of before. We often think the ...”

“... in October, during what the Israeli Army called its ‘incursion’ – a euphemism inherited from Richard Nixon’s invasion of Cambodia – into towns under the nominal jurisdiction of the Palestinian Authority. Young men distributed dry sticks of olive wood to dip into a barrel of fire. In Arabic and English, white banners proclaimed ‘Jerusalem is also ...”

“... I suppose because the rasping quality in his voice echoed Auden’s harsh tones. However, because Richard Griffiths was available and indeed anxious to play the part, the role went to him. Emergency casting sessions such as the one Gambon knew we were holding are always mildly hysterical and often very funny as assorted names (often wildly unsuitable) are put ...”

“... He did this without always making his intentions clear. O’Doherty recounts the experience of Richard O’Rawe, a former IRA member, who, having served a prison sentence for armed robbery, decided his fighting days were over and took a job in the Sinn Féin press office. O’Rawe still believed that the political campaign was a way of winning broader ...”