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“... mid-life reaction-to-the-reactionary. After all, the world has seen such things before; remember Robert Frost’s ‘I never dared be radical when young/For fear it would make me conservative when old.’ In fact, however, it is nothing of the sort. Norris is a passionately engaged radical critic of the Anglo-American Establishment. It is precisely because ...”

“... attributed to Hobbes, will be dismayed to find it re-attributed to one of his closest friends, Robert Payne. Another tract, of considerable importance as it has generally been taken to be Hobbes’s first major work of philosophy, the ‘Short Tract on First Principles’, has also recently been re-attributed to Payne, correctly in Malcolm’s ...”

“... is early slang for “homosexual”, and “man of all trades”, in a gay context, self-explanatory.’ (She does not cite the delightful, if apocryphal, story of the woman who had a crush on the handsome and multi-talented Bernstein and replied, on being told that he was gay: ‘Is there nothing that that man can’t do?’) She goes on to ...”

“... who has what I’d call an unusually good memory for apparel, possessed that keen sense of self-preservation that the more emotional ‘Dick’ Hannay lacked. ‘I certainly didn’t address him the way I had at other times, as Mr Hoover.’ I should just about think not. A year later, Mrs Rosenstiel, still a martyr to her hubby’s specialised ...”

“... a gentle landscape of lawns and sparkling streams, and yet its freedom is ‘fictitious’. ‘Self-dependent lordlings’ have been able to engross power and make laws that suit their own interests at the expense of the country as a whole, and have at the same time convinced the meanest peasant that he too is free: Pride in their port, defiance in their ...”

“... European Parliament. The lessons that Macron drew from his 2017 campaign seemed, as the historian Robert Zaretzky wrote, to be the ‘wrong ones’ for 2019. Part of the reason is technical. Unlike the majority system in national elections in France, the European Parliament is elected by proportional representation, which does not produce a single ...”

“... responded when she saw the plans. Over eight pages she dismissed the scheme as an alienating, self-consciously futuristic ‘Flash Gordon job’. She begged her father to build something instead that ‘expresses the best of the society in which you live, and at the same time your hopes for the betterment of this society’.Bronfman, keen to have his ...”

“... most notoriously violent moment. The period has been much written about in the forty years since Robert Conquest made the Soviet 1930s synonymous with the Great Terror. Scholarship on prewar Stalinism has bifurcated. On the one hand, studies of the Terror have become more detailed and nuanced. Now that the Soviet archives have been opened, it seems that the ...”

“... coarse gesture of condescension and appeasement to the Russians’, and she asked if Lean and Robert Bolt would have placed a rainbow ‘over the future of England’. Actually it’s difficult to think of David Lean placing rainbows anywhere much, and more significantly, the mood of the rainbow, if not the actual image, is fully there in Boris ...”

“... emperor Menelik II and his queen Taytu Betul, who thanks to their good looks and skill at self-promotion were already familiar figures on the world stage. Diplomats, arms dealers, journalists and the plain curious from Europe and the US hurried to ingratiate themselves with the victors in the hope of securing lucrative contracts. Westerners sought to ...”

“... declared, quoting Pasternak. Here she distinguished herself from her contemporaries: poets like Robert Creeley, Jack Spicer and Paul Blackburn often harked back to fraternal tropes of the knight, troubadour, jongleur. Never king. Guest’s origins were anything but kingly: born in North Carolina in 1920, she was shuffled around from town to town in ...”

“... very occasional use of the phrase ‘invisible hand’ – the now well-worn metaphor for the self-regulating capacity of the free market – was playful rather than integral to his message. The co-architect of New Labour, Gordon Brown, went a few steps further, attempting to rehabilitate Smith, not without some plausibility, as a proponent of ‘the ...”

“... and Hertfordshire as well as Glamis, the Scottish estate granted to an ancestor, Sir John Lyon, by Robert II in 1372. While not especially wealthy by the standards of the aristocracy of her day, they can have had no anxieties about their place in society, any more than Elizabeth, tucked snugly in towards the bottom of a large and affectionate family, seems to ...”

“... referred to themselves as the L-A-N-G-U-A-G-E poets. The work of this group was always wrapped in self-justifying, crudely fashioned, post-structuralist commentary, and emphasised indeterminism, resistance to figuration, narrative, subject-matter, verbal music, imagery or any pleasure that might be associated with poetry, pleasure which they believed pandered ...”

“... even for a mega-rich guy. Newhouse wanted both respectability and profitability, and turned to Robert Gottlieb, editor-in-chief at Knopf (US publisher of Nobrow, for those keeping score), as the man to make this cocktail swirl. In a retrospect that is easy but exact, Seabrook sees Gottlieb as a transitional figure with a compromise strategy – to use ...”