“... the reservations she had held all along.When Major lost heavily to Blair in 1997, Thatcher backed William Hague to succeed him, swinging enough MPs behind her choice to get him comfortably over the line. When Hague lost to Blair just as badly four years later, Thatcher gave her support to Iain Duncan-Smith, helping him to see off Michael Portillo and Kenneth ...”

“... undead – silky and nocturnal-looking in black vampire cape, tricorn hat, pointy flamenco shoes, white geisha make-up and a slash of dark red lipstick. This ghoulish get-up seems to have made her irresistible. Cohen rehearses de Acosta’s astonishing sensual history gracefully enough, but her main goal is to persuade us that de Acosta was also an ...”

“... of a physical crisis (appendicitis), which came on at the launch party for a friend’s novel – William Styron’s The Confessions of Nat Turner – were interpreted as somatic manifestations of envy. But although there were gaps in his treatment, he went on seeing Kleinschmidt for five years. Then, in 1967, he discovered that Kleinschmidt had used material ...”

“... the recent Tate catalogue of Cahun photographs owned by the Jersey Heritage Trust, she sports a white leotard and boxing shorts – comically accessorised with cattle-rustler kerchief, wrist-guards and Betty Boop lipstick. Crudely printed across her chest, graffiti-style, are the gnomic words ‘I Am in Training Don’t Kiss Me’ and a pair of pouty ...”

“... of the two in the writer’s work gives some sense of his giant reticent power of mind. To quote William Empson, on another subject: ‘The contradictions cover such a range’ – yet they are always reciprocal, in communication with each other. The meaning of Hamlet must be intrinsic with what in it holds audiences and readers. And, even if King Lear has ...”

“... to wage nuclear war. Their campaign had a considerable impact, and when Richard Nixon got to the White House four years later he was convinced that scientists were a dangerously anti-Republican political lobby. Nixon shut down the Office of Science and Technology, and kicked the presidential science adviser out of the cabinet – an effective and still ...”

“... regulation, still attached to Birmingham and Cambridge Universities. Gently sunburned, with white hair and beard, he’s almost seventy; he has a Puckish energy, an enthusiasm more postgraduate than professorial, and a way of punctuating his conversation with a falsetto giggle. He once said that instead of RIP, the inscription on his gravestone should ...”

“... crimsons’ – part of the Customs compound which, 15 years later, became the classrooms where William Empson taught English during the Sino-Japanese War, encountering his own brigands outside the city walls (as described in the London Review of 5 October 1995). At Mengtze, wedlock all but crumbled. Stella fell out of love, my father into hurt ...”

“... present concerns, processes fragments of the past in roughly the same way that assorted blocks of white fish, bulked out with filler, are processed into fish fingers. Myths have a market; myth-busting has a small one; setting the historical Darwin in his Victorian intellectual and social context has practically none at all.Barry Werth’s Banquet at ...”

“... population growth’. The lead author of both the 2017 and 2019 reports, an ecologist named William Ripple, told Business Insider that ‘if an individual is concerned about climate change, three things to consider include: one, reducing the use of fossil fuels; two, eating mostly a plant-based diet; and three, having fewer ...”

“... many) don’t try to disguise their underlying assumption: that ‘civilisation’ is something white people do, and that conflict beyond ‘European’ borders is the natural state of things. ‘War is no longer something visited upon impoverished and remote populations,’ Daniel Hannan wrote in the Daily Telegraph. ‘They seem so like us. That is what ...”

“... the more thoroughly it is embedded in narrative detail, the more difficult it is to make black and white judgments. This approach to ethics might be contrasted with the rule-governed morality of utilitarianism and the categorical imperative of Kant, purportedly applicable in all places and at all times. We should not draw the line between virtue and rules too ...”

“... against the concealment and silence that the loss of Palestine had imposed, and that his father, William Said, had accepted, leaving behind not only the family’s past in Jerusalem but also his Arab name, Wadie. After 1967, Said embraced the Palestinian struggle – an act of ‘affiliation’, as he put it, a commitment based on belief, rather than ...”

“... doing so to ‘hear him out’. They knew, because everyone knew, what Yiannopoulos stood for – white nationalism, misogyny, xenophobia – and they wanted to give those politics a platform. That was perhaps their right. But it was also the right of their fellow students to call on them to think better of that morally questionable decision. Had a ...”

“... independence on the bank, which operates without any of the counterweights – Congress, the White House, the Treasury – that surround the Fed, embedding it in a political setting where it is publicly accountable. Unlike any other central bank, the independence of the ECB isn’t merely statutory, its rules or aims alterable by parliamentary ...”