“... public, and a recognised ‘act’. In 1978, Berlin wrote a private letter to the psychiatrist Anthony Storr, wondering why he, a beloved only child, should still be visited with the feeling that his many attainments were ‘of very little or of no value’. This takes us some way beyond the pose of false modesty, but nowhere near as far as self-hatred.I ...”

“... her leverage.’ Others agreed, but they were all ignored, in favour of such sages as Iain Duncan Smith. ‘You have no idea how bad this is,’ Rogers told the cabinet secretary, Jeremy Heywood. ‘She’s put herself in an incredibly weak negotiating position. She’s blown herself up, she just doesn’t know it yet.’We know how it went after that ...”

“... flunkeys and conspiracy theories, has obliged his administration’s scientific authorities, Anthony Fauci and Deborah Birx, to tiptoe around his volcanic ego. The blithe inaction and bumbling born of ideological vanity have resulted in tens of thousands of avoidable deaths in both countries, with ethnic minorities heavily ...”

“... themselves, and wildly exaggerated losses on the other side. According to two military historians, Anthony Cordesman and Abraham Wagner, Iranian deaths were between 450,000 and 730,000, and Iraqi deaths between 150,000 and 340,000. They estimate that the war cost Iran $69 billion, and Iraq $159 billion. ‘Few wars in modern history,’ they conclude, ‘did ...”

“... had left it the evening before’. He lodged for a long time in London with Hester Travers Smith, the author of Psychic Messages from Oscar Wilde. In the years between Beckett’s arrival in Paris in 1928, where he and McGreevy taught at the Ecole Normale Supérieure, and the outbreak of the Second World War, the years in which the letters in this ...”

“... Lynn had a third daughter, Alison, with Irving, and Leslie had two more children, Diana and Anthony Stone. It’s Di too who most strongly links and splits Love’s Work with the famously ‘forbidding’ The Broken Middle, in which it appears in a new guise as Di-remption, ‘modernity’s ancient predicament’, as Rose introduces it, ‘this ...”

“... in her search for new ideas she could bring to the fight. She read heavyweight books – Adam Smith, Burke, Popper, Hayek – and carefully noted their contents. She enjoyed talking about these writers when she got the chance. But did she really understand them? One of the questions that has always dogged Thatcher is whether she was intellectually ...”

“... taken in January 1997 at his 50th birthday celebrations, with Billy Corgan, Lou Reed and Robert Smith. This was the period when he finally found inner calm and displayed outer happiness, relaxed into himself. But take a look at this photo: doesn’t he look a bit wizened, a bit unreal, like a doll of himself or a plastic action figure of a late-era rock ...”

“... book-jacket and by all accounts Larkin the librarian could be a pretty daunting figure. Neville Smith remembers him at Hull stood at the entrance to the Brynmor Jones, scanning the faces of the incoming hordes, the face heavy and expressionless, the glasses gleaming and the hands, after the manner of a soccer player awaiting a free-kick on the edge of the ...”

“... at Ellingham Hall Assange was fast asleep. He’d been living there, at the house of Vaughan Smith, one of his sureties and founder of the Frontline Club, since his arrest on Swedish rape allegations. He was effectively under house arrest and wearing an electronic tag on his leg. He would sign in at Beccles police station every afternoon, proving he ...”

“... now facing the electric chair in Georgia. He had the good fortune to be represented on appeal by Anthony Amsterdam, a learned and rhetorically gifted Stanford law professor. His argument before the Supreme Court not only saved his client’s life but irrevocably changed the history of the death penalty in America, if not exactly as he might have ...”

“... Victoria King, who was 71, and her daughter Alexandra Atala, on the 20th floor, never made it out. Anthony Disson, 65, a former bin man and Fulham fan, left it very late before trying to get out of his flat. ‘We used to go “totting” together,’ his son, Lee, said. ‘You know, scrap iron. He had a big horse called Lady and a little Shetland’ – he ...”