“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... of Change UK in 2019 (I had entirely forgotten about this); May’s resignation and Boris Johnson’s accession; his appallingly dishonest approach to cutting a deal with the EU; the attempt to prorogue Parliament (lest we forget); another snap election in December that year; disaster for the Corbyn project. Polling day was cold, dark and rainy. When ...”

“... spent in a wheelchair. This wasn’t her first brush with brokenness. According to her cousin Kim Martin, who spoke at Pistorius’s sentencing (the only time during the whole trial that the Steenkamp family got a hearing), when Reeva was a young girl the family’s pet poodle became paralysed and was going to have to be put down. Reeva saved the ...”

“... say that even if the climate is changing, it isn’t our fault. ‘We human beings,’ Boris Johnson wrote in the Telegraph in January, ‘have become so blind with conceit and self-love that we genuinely believe that the fate of the planet is in our hands.’ On the one hand, then, the modest mayor of London. On the other, a former head of the US ...”

“... Cassady in t-shirt, Kerouac in a Stetson; the kind of image that is now surfacing, as Joyce Johnson recalls, in hip advertisements for Gap khakis (with ‘black-sweatered girlfriend’ airbrushed out). A predatory colonisation of the past. Carolyn’s own traditional artworks, chalk drawings of ballerinas, pencil sketches of Ginsberg and Cassady and ...”

“... based on Arab-Jewish co-operation, one that counted among its members Ahad Ha’am, Judah Magnes, Martin Buber and Hannah Arendt. In 1907, the cultural Zionist Yitzhak Epstein accused the Zionist movement of having forgotten ‘one small detail: that there is in our beloved land an entire people that has been attached to it for hundreds of years and has never ...”