“... to simmer and the Times chuntered on about ‘the dark million’. In the late 1960s Enoch Powell began his fanatical campaigning and seemed to attract mass support. Pressure for new, even tighter immigration legislation was building up.It was now, a few years after Kenyan independence in 1963, that the British government became reluctantly aware of ...”

“... Thatcher still likes or admires. The soul-mates are virtually all conservative odd-balls: Enoch Powell, whose ‘greatest regret was that [he] wasn’t killed in the war’, the batty Keith Joseph, the transparently pretentious Laurens van der Post, the relentlessly downmarket Norman Tebbit and Alfred Sherman who, though Jewish himself, risked his career to ...”

“... been modest in South Africa – but most British guide books now refer to Mafeking, where Baden-Powell was famously relieved, as Mafikeng, the correct, pre-siege name. Equally pleasurable is the resolute refusal to rename the streets in Maputo, the capital of Mozambique, which abandoned Marxism-Leninism in the Eighties and held elections in ...”

“... told him sent Seabrook back to writers who are in the Oxford Companion, Waugh, Betjeman, Anthony Powell and Jocelyn Brooke. I’m not sure that any other critic is capable of enthusing, in one long breath, about Brooke and David Peace (author of a tersely written novel sequence from the era of Peter Sutcliffe, the Yorkshire Ripper). Nobody else would link ...”

“... Tory journalists who campaigned against the Good Friday Agreement, including his cabinet colleague Michael Gove.Northern Irish politics are more turbulent than at any time since the Good Friday Agreement was signed. Sinn Féin and the Democratic Unionist Party came close to an agreement for the restoration of power-sharing at the start of 2018, but the DUP ...”

“... Vietnam – and then in a less controlled fashion, as crystallised with evil genius by Enoch Powell in 1968: ‘We must be mad, literally mad, as a nation to be permitting the annual inflow of some fifty thousand dependants … It is like watching a nation busily engaged in heaping up its own funeral pyre.’ ‘As the floodgates of social dissent ...”

“... in the United States has produced many martyrs: Medgar Evers and Martin Luther King; James Chaney, Michael Schwerner and Andrew Goodman. And now Heather Heyer, the 32-year-old paralegal killed in Emancipation Park. It is true, as some have sanctimoniously pointed out, that even in her death, Heyer was a beneficiary of white privilege, remembered as a ‘strong ...”

“... Darwinian revolution is often structured also excludes important middle positions: those of Baden Powell and Richard Owen, for example, who were perfectly happy to have divinely ordained creation through secondary causes even before Darwin’s theory was in print. And even T.H. Huxley, for all his busy anti-clericalism, would not go the whole way with the ...”

“... my career. They wouldn’t publish the book, they said, as a favour to me.’ In London, however, Michael Joseph agreed to publish Giovanni’s Room and, later, in New York, a small publisher, the Dial Press, offered to bring the book out. It first appeared in 1956. Both Go Tell It on the Mountain and Giovanni’s Room were declarations of independence for ...”

“... Here is the customised red convertible Cadillac Eldorado that belonged to Chuck Berry; here too is Michael Jackson’s fedora, Lightnin’ Hopkins’s guitar, Louis Armstrong’s trumpet. There is a large temporary exhibition about Oprah Winfrey. ‘She has a place in the museum with a long line of women who did extraordinary things in their time – Harriet ...”

“... that a second resolution was necessary to protect him from criticism at home, and got Colin Powell’s support for a futile attempt to circumvent a French veto in the Security Council. Such mutual hypocrisies put Annan in an awkward spot. Blessing the Balkan war was one thing: in 1999, the West was united in the attack on Yugoslavia. But now the ...”

“... government – an opportunity the Trump campaign declined. Mueller’s most recent arrestee, Michael Flynn, the unhinged Islamophobe who was briefly Trump’s national security adviser, has pleaded guilty to charges of lying to the FBI about meeting the Russian ambassador in December – weeks after the election. This is the sort of backchannel diplomacy ...”

“... thought of Hitler’, and she was intensely proud of the British Empire. According to Sir Charles Powell, probably the most influential private secretary she had in Downing Street, the Prime Minister was in thrall to childhood memories. ‘For a small girl growing up in Grantham the Germans were about as evil as anything you could think of.’ In that ...”

“... of the Soviet Union through propaganda. The names on Orwell’s list included Charlie Chaplin, Michael Foot and the historian E.H. Carr, as well as Peter Smollett, who was indeed a Soviet agent, and who had probably advised Jonathan Cape not to publish Animal Farm in 1944.Burgess explains at length that Orwell’s list was not a McCarthyite hit list, since ...”

“... this, but the best is probably to begin with its dedication. The book is devoted to the memory of Michael Oakeshott – whose thought, Mount tells us, has left its traces, ‘no doubt sadly smudged’, on many of its pages. At first glance, the affinity between author and authority seems straightforward enough, for Oakeshott was widely held to be the most ...”