“... with big ideas for changing the world. The successful candidates were a bunch of mini-Thiels: self-styled libertarians, contemptuous of college and its pointless rituals. ‘They were – nearly all of them – boys,’ as Chafkin points out, ‘and, almost to a person, they shared Thiel’s social awkwardness.’ One 17-year-old was hoping to extend the ...”

“... NoViolet Bulawayo​ intended to write a non-fiction account of the 2017 coup that deposed Robert Mugabe and made Emmerson Mnangagwa, his one-time deputy, the third president of Zimbabwe. But she couldn’t keep up with the changing political situation. There was a sense of bitterness: the coup wasn’t the new beginning many had hoped for ...”

“... to their previous owners, a dozen being among the 25 barons – the most barefaced example of self-interest in the proceedings. When the king met the barons at Oxford a month later, they treated him with contempt. John was in bed, unable to walk because of gout. The barons refused to come to him in his chamber. When he was carried into them on a ...”

“... the Earl of Essex for treason in 1601 when the earl’s antagonist, the queen’s leading minister Robert Cecil, secretly present in the court, stepped from behind an arras to deliver the impassioned speech that ruined the earl’s defence of his rebellion? Which of the assumptions of disguise by beleaguered or lovelorn dramatis personae can have been as ...”

“... favourite potential target. Incinerating North Korea in a pre-emptive strike would be an act of self-defence, as Trump sees it: in his speech to the UN General Assembly, he said that the US ‘will have no choice but to totally destroy North Korea’ if ‘Rocket Man’ develops a weapon that can reach Denver. (Like genocide, nuclear war is invariably ...”

“... on 22 October 4004 bc. Nor were ideas of ‘development’ new in themselves, and writers such as Robert Chambers, in his bestseller of the 1840s Vestiges of the Natural History of Creation, could run together an eclectic mix of geology, natural history and philosophical speculation to propose some kind of ‘evolutionary’ story. After 1859, Darwin’s name ...”

“... came back home. You can count the exceptions on the fingers of one hand: Patrick Cockburn, Robert Fisk, one or two others. Iraq’s social infrastructure still isn’t working, years after the occupation ended; it’s been wrecked. The country has been demodernised. The West has destroyed Iraq’s education services and medical services; it handed over ...”

“... facial gymnastics, which in Moto were so pointless, are here used to show the murderer’s divided self. Lang – a sadistic director – pushed Lorre to his limits on set, forcing him repeatedly to redo a scene where he is kicked in the shins until he couldn’t walk for three days. As Beckert breathlessly laments the impossibility of escaping ‘from ...”

“... affairs. Kennan was glad to do so and invited several outsiders, including Reinhold Niebuhr and Robert Oppenheimer, to join him. They concluded that a sovereignty strong enough to calm French fears about Germany and resist what they took to be the threat of Soviet expansion would have to include the British and that the British, to maintain what they could ...”

“... some perplexity’. A short time later Eliot and Mansfield met at a dinner party in Hammersmith (Robert Graves was also present) where, she wrote, Eliot ‘grew paler and paler and more and more silent’ while their host (whom she likened to a butcher) ‘cut up, trimmed and smacked into shape the whole of America and the Americans’. The two, he without ...”

“... influenced by the statistics on prison deaths: in the years between 1990 and 2003 there were 947 self-inflicted deaths in prison, 177 of them of detainees aged 21 or under. At the time the case was heard more than a third of the deaths – there were very nearly two a week – were of people who had not even been convicted of an offence. One in five of those ...”

“... the rich-bastard-favouring cut in the 50 per cent income tax rate; all these combined to make as self-evident and immediate a cock-up as anyone could remember. Six months later, it looked even worse. That’s because the economic outlook has continued to darken. One of the first things Osborne did as chancellor was to set up a new body, the Office of Budget ...”

“... and exterior had become indistinguishable. Tumbledown shacks contained ailing Land Rovers, self-cannibalising motorcycles and birds of prey in various stages of recuperation: an owl, a saker falcon, a chug and several common buzzards. A protective wall was constructed from corrugated iron and plasterboard. The corrugated iron rhymes very elegantly with ...”

“... I lack musical intelligence – for which I don’t even have genetics to blame. My older brother, Robert, is a successful pianist. Or, to quote my book Beethoven’s Kiss: Dr Train, the psychoanalyst my father had me see when [my brother] Steve killed himself, once told me, after having determined that my mother hadn’t caused my homosexuality, that the ...”

“... aesthetic, sotto-voce style’, his ‘preference for backstage manoeuvring’, an ‘unfailing self-regard’ and the way ‘he quickly forms fixed opinions about people, sometimes based on scant evidence’ (no evidence was given for this opinion about Kushner’s opinions: no evidence and no source). ‘He also has a habit,’ unnamed sources were ...”