“... Fukuyama has arrived at a similar conclusion, and among fictional characters, the heroine of Richard Condon’s novel The Final Addiction. Like them, Fisher insists that the ingenuity of global capitalism now flows into all the interstices of out lives, and that, with its sublime new products, it will revolutionise all our former assumptions. He declares ...”

“... Stuart Arminianism and ceremonialism coloured by the 19th-century Anglican legacy. We may have read too much Trollope, from whose pages it would not be hard to construct the familiar caricature of a worldly, corpulent Jacobean clergy, basking under the lax supervision of courtly bishops. Then there is the hindsight problem. Some distinguished accounts of ...”

“... biddable grafter like the rest. Is it possible that such critiques may rest on not having actually read much of Burke? Certainly Berlin, in his generous way, conceded in a correspondence with O’Brien that ‘I really should not argue with you about Burke. I know virtually nothing about him except what most people know – the image handed down in history ...”

“... secreted by the mother for herself and her eggs, a kind of hatchery. It would be a challenge to read it without thinking of Mary recalling Marianne to the shell and the pair crawling inside like two cephalopods recolonising the nursery. The first stanza speaks of entrapment but in the last lines the argonaut clinging to its little edifice suggests that ...”

“... down the windows and a 13-foot Frank Gehry crocodile on the wall. Sexy Fish is the creation of Richard Caring, most famous for the Ivy, the restaurant in Soho that flaunts its exclusivity by being as apparently modest and downbeat as possible. That works for the posh English, but modern Mayfair money has another set of tastes to be pandered to. Crossing ...”

“... public services.’ Klein also presents a rogues’ gallery of statesmen-lobbyists (such as Richard Perle and Bruce Jackson) who made a strong public case for the invasion of Iraq and went on to make millions of dollars from the war and occupation. Cheney and Rumsfeld, who were capable of unleashing disasters, maintained their financial interests in ...”

“... a first-rate American poetess. She really is good. Certainly one of the best female poets I ever read, and a damn sight better than the run of good male. Her main enthusiasm at present is me, and she thinks my verses are as good as I think they are and has accordingly and efficiently dispatched about twenty five to various immensely paying American ...”

“... that Jewish writer who slept in a room lined with cork and wrote the famous book I could never read. You know, Marcel something . . . Nebbishy looking. He smelt of mothballs, wore a fur coat down to the ground, asked heaps about make-up. Would a duchess use rouge? Did demi-mondaines put kohl on their eyes? How should I know? But then, how could I have ...”

“... the truth if a lie would serve him just as well’. Even his closest associates found him hard to read. ‘You keep your cards close up against your belly,’ his interior secretary, Harold Ickes, complained. ‘You never put them on the table.’ Roosevelt played off one adviser against another as a matter of course. ‘Never let your left hand know what ...”

“... of the Learned Elders of Zion to serve the British Empire. (Some of them, like Churchill, read and recommended the Protocols, until the Times exposed it as a fake.) The British Ambassador in Constantinople reported that Jews were behind the revolution of the Young Turks of 1908, a complete nonsense. ‘I do not think it is easy to exaggerate the ...”

“... like himself. Judith Mackrell suspects that Lydia Lopokova was being mischievous when she chose to read ‘The Red Shoes’ on the wireless for the BBC in 1935. Lopokova was a born show-off but she never sold her soul to the dance. She was unusually free of ‘the psychological perils of her vocation’: ‘masochism, obsession and narcissism’. In fact she ...”

“... post-9/11 journal Standpoint, somewhere to the right of the ‘new’ British centre.But to read back through his pieces for the paper, and the reviews of his books, among them a glowing piece by Paul Foot in 1986, is to know that he isn’t easily pinned down. Yet if there were laws against inciting party political hatred, Johnson would have been fined ...”

“... that came before him. And BBC managers are unsackable. In the recent judgment on the Cliff Richard case, besides criticising the rationale behind broadcasting the story in the first place (which, typically enough, was in part to avoid criticism for not broadcasting it), the judge found that the UK news editor was not a reliable witness and that the ...”

“... know of the man for whom their school is named. The Columbia undergraduates up the street, who read W.E.B. Du Bois’s The Souls of Black Folk in the Plato-to-Arendt ‘great books’ course mandatory for all sophomores, have probably never heard of the man who was, in the 1930s, one of Du Bois’s crucial collaborators as well as one of his sharpest ...”

“... was launched in 2017 ‘to challenge herd mentality wherever we see it’. At first the website read like a more sedate version of the Telegraph’s opinion pages and struggled to make an impact. But since 2019, when ConservativeHome founder Tim Montgomerie was replaced as editor and Freddie Sayers joined as executive editor (he is now editor-in-chief and ...”