“... a name. In 2019, when he stood down, his would-be successor was beaten by a Conservative in Boris Johnson’s get-Brexit-done landslide. A picture from the night shows Johnson pounding the air with his fists and gurning in triumph at the Blyth result, the first time Labour had lost the seat since it was established in ...”

“... defeated though it was, and in part because of the restraints imposed on it by Kennedy, Johnson and Nixon, was in retrospect an essential and noble demonstration to the world, and especially to the Communists, that America was determined even under the most daunting circumstances to fight against any expansion anywhere of Communist domination. Howe ...”

“... miscue in his dealings with Bellow to account for the bungling of what could have been a beautiful Johnson-Boswell partnership. The book is a goody bag of quotable incidents and a useful guide to the biographer’s tradecraft, but pertinent to our immediate interest is the section where Atlas gives a draft of the work in progress to the social scientist Edward ...”

“... something that the social at its highest serves to nourish and protect, as the parent the child. Martin Buber called it the ‘I:Thou relation’. The two kings as children loved each other. Under the frigid social discourse lies the necessity that empowers it, the human innocence of loving. But the second courtier, Camillo, makes it plain how appallingly ...”

“... his scholarship: he led the Council of Economic Advisers from 1961 to 1964, under Kennedy then Johnson, and had been economic adviser to Hubert Humphrey’s presidential campaign until, just a week before the debate in New York, it ended with the election of Richard Nixon. Friedman had been closely involved with Barry Goldwater’s ...”

“... comparably harrowing stories to be evoked: This was the period of the Irish famine and Mrs Bell Martin ... devoted herself to the relief of her father’s tenants. In so doing, she ruined her family and was gratefully termed ‘The Princess of Connemara’ by her people. Thereafter penniless and landless, she emigrated to Belgium where she supported herself ...”

“... garden, the ‘superbe solitude’ admired by Rousseau. Stowe was also, as its historian John Martin Robinson puts it, a centre of power where ‘policy was framed, governments made or broken … and the expansion of the British Empire planned’. Not until the later 18th century – after Brown’s time – did it become ‘the place from which England ...”

“... by officials with close ties to Israel or to prominent pro-Israel organisations; among them, Martin Indyk, the former deputy director of research at AIPAC and co-founder of the pro-Israel Washington Institute for Near East Policy (WINEP); Dennis Ross, who joined WINEP after leaving government in 2001; and Aaron Miller, who has lived in Israel and often ...”

“... supported some form of amnesty for ex-soldiers. During that summer’s leadership election, Boris Johnson and Jeremy Hunt both signed a ‘veterans’ pledge’ presented to them by the Sun. It promised, among other things, ‘new legislation to end repeated and vexatious investigations into historical allegations against our servicemen and women ...”

“... and elisions haunted the rhetoric of liberalism from the beginning. ‘How is it,’ Samuel Johnson asked about secession-minded American colonists, ‘that we hear the loudest yelps for liberty among the drivers of negroes?’ John Stuart Mill credited India’s free-trading British overlords with benign liberal intentions towards a people ...”

“... that of the early 19th century, or James Joyce, Dylan Thomas, Ted Hughes, Anthony Burgess, Martin Amis (all OED2 authors) that of today. The opposite is true: we should expect the language of these writers to stand out in a contrasting way from current usage, although this will obviously vary from writer to writer and indeed from word to word. But this ...”

“... of the story, a most un-Mailerish trait, but it’s clear he loved his subject as Boswell loved Johnson, seeing Mailer through a thousand eyes, but leaving the field clear for the rest of us who only have one pair. My last evening with Norman was decisive. When the Paris Review appeared containing the interview we worked on together, an event was arranged ...”

“... crowd was entertained by a choir of Black children dressed as slaves, among them the ten-year-old Martin Luther King.O’Connor’s story ‘A Late Encounter with the Enemy’, published in Harper’s Bazaar in 1953, lampoons the première and the sentimental vision of Southern identity it represented. This is how it begins:General Sash was 104 years old. He ...”

“... picture on the title page to sort out. It was commissioned from a mediocre Flemish engraver called Martin Droeshout, who worked either from a now-lost portrait painted during the author’s lifetime (perhaps by Richard Burbage), or perhaps just from a proto-identikit sketch prepared by his surviving colleagues (the engraving is bad enough to support either ...”

“... was happening. The distortion, he said, reminded him of the 1964 Gulf of Tonkin incident, when the Johnson administration reversed the sequence of National Security Agency intercepts to justify one of the early bombings of North Vietnam. The same official said there was immense frustration inside the military and intelligence bureaucracy: ‘The guys are ...”