“... ideas of self-sacrifice and martyrdom, they did as they were told. (The celibacy rule is to this day so tightly enforced that there are separate times for men and women to use Camp Ashraf’s petrol station.) Members were urged to transfer their passions from their former spouses to their leaders, the Rajavis. Aware that people were becoming sexually ...”

“... startled, hurt, a little scared. We asked to see some ID. He’d lost his wallet earlier that day, he said. But he could get us some ID from his mum’s house in West London – if we’d just wait a couple of days. He started to get angry. How could we not trust him? It was because he went to Oxford, wasn’t it? Because he was posh. It was so unfair, he ...”

“... least in making their choice between parties. The Conservative share in the polls in 1987 on the day Tim Bell rode into Downing Street on a white charger was 44 per cent. One week later, after the expenditure of all the serious money on advertising, their share of votes came out at ... 43 per cent. It wasn’t the media in 1987 which gave Mrs Thatcher her ...”

“... an entirely reasonable feeling that there must be more to political life than perpetual defeat. Neil Kinnock and John Smith felt this as strongly as their successors, but their successors went a lot further. In a famous essay published nearly ninety years ago, Max Weber suggested that politics was becoming the territory of the professional: politics was the ...”

“... outbursts of unmotivated violence. Occasionally his characters simply die out of the blue: ‘One day Orlov stuffed himself with mashed peas and died. Krylov, having heard the news, also died. And Spiridonov died regardless. And Spiridonov’s wife fell from the cupboard and also died. And the Spiridonov children drowned in a pond.’ ‘Characters’ is ...”

“... and the Civil War. Their agenda was nationalist rather than social or economic. On St Patrick’s Day 1943 de Valera broadcast a version of his dream for Ireland: ‘a land whose countryside would be bright with cosy homesteads, whose fields and villages would be joyous with the sounds of industry, with the romping of sturdy children, the contests of athletic ...”

“... which collapsed in the early Nineties, while Scargill continued to hang on – as he does to this day – to the presidency of a union which is now in toto less than half the size of the Yorkshire area he inherited in 1973. This support never went without saying. Other figures, less flamboyant though undoubtedly more loyal, could rely on the Party for more ...”

“... with Mandela. There are politicians whose ability to be neutral is even more suspect – Neil Kinnock heads a Labour Party team, for example; rock stars come to clean up on the South African circuit so long off-limits to them; endless self-appointed ‘monitoring’ teams from black American universities; old South African exiles like the actor ...”

“... the not very saintly Saint Olaf. We hear nothing of them from the British Museum, and in the book Neil Price has only two pages on ‘The Way of the Warrior’, one of them devoted to challenging ‘the idea that “proper” Vikings were necessarily male’. It’s true that the literary evidence provides examples of female heroism, and of noble female ...”

“... patently absurd, it is impossible to understand the attitude of some of those involved – such as Neil Kinnock – without appreciating that a weaker version of the argument does have a certain intuitive appeal. The case for going on subsidising uneconomic pits rests on two propositions. First, production of North Sea oil will peak next year or very soon ...”

“... The next year produced both Carter’s film The Company of Wolves, a horror story directed by Neil Jordan, in which the heroine turns into a wolf, and Nights at the Circus, whose winged protagonist is, as Carter emphasises, ‘a big girl’. Her misjudged but reiterated contempt for Penelope Fitzgerald, who won the Booker Prize in 1979, was perhaps of a ...”

“... crowed over: You overreached yourself, Patroclus.   Yes, my darling, Not only God was out that day but Lord Apollo. ‘You know Apollo loves the Trojans ... ’ The point is emphasised on the next page with enlarged typography and later by a double page with APOLLO’S name Pounding across it in huge block capitals, like Chinese characters in The ...”

“... and physically (he got into a number of fist fights at Oxford). He also had what another brother, Neil, described as ‘intense superficial sentimentality’, allowing himself to be overcome by gusts of skin-deep emotion. He was clearly encouraged by the notion that Churchill (whom he knew well) had a personality somewhat similar to his own. It was a fatal ...”

“... one, as his earlier Devolving English Literature implies, more firmly focused on a latter-day drama in which the last act of the dismantling of Empire is played out in terms of the breakup of the United Kingdom. Appropriately, the main proposition, reiterated through a number of carefully linked, not to say insistent and repetitive essays, is starkly ...”

“... the pain’. ‘He makes some feel better for a bit. But he cannot fix what ails them, and one day they’ll realise it.’ In private he said Trump could be ‘America’s Hitler’. But all criticism had vanished by the time he launched his 2022 Senate bid. So significant a reversal might prompt soul-searching or reflection in a lesser man, but Vance ...”