“... thought of the queen’s sister living on their doorstep, and were deeply disappointed when the young couple failed to arrive and celebrate Christmas in the former priory buildings. The necessary dissolutions needed to be sorted out at high speed (not least because the new Elizabeth Cromwell was advanced in pregnancy), and so for the first time every monk ...”

“... victims of Western standards of humanity.’ Editing the piece for the New York Review of Books, Robert Silvers objected to the unqualified critique of Western capitalism: ‘Won’t you keep in mind the Western reader who might not want to cross the slag heaps with you?’ (She felt he had edited the piece into a ‘mild, unchallenging plea’.) With its ...”

“... who were ARD advisers: ‘These gentlemen would alert us, tip us off, help us. “There is a young graduate student down the hall working on something. We think it is interesting; you have to decide if it has commercial possibilities.”’ The scheme worked: among early ARD-funded spin-offs from MIT was the Digital Equipment Corporation. ARD committed ...”

“... they found so mesmerising: W.H. Auden believed that Eliot had had a mystical vision when he was a young child, Hart Crane was convinced that he was secretly gay, while Delmore Schwartz was a fount of scurrilous stories about Eliot’s sex life, which, according to Schwartz, included a relationship with the Jewish woman referred to as Rachel née Rabinovitch ...”

“... On 13 October​ 1806 a young German philosopher, Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel, had an encounter with world history. En route to their annihilation of the Prussian forces 24 hours later, Napoleon and his army were marching through the East German university town of Jena. Hegel couldn’t disguise his terror that in the ensuing chaos the recently completed manuscript of The Phenomenology of Spirit might get lost in the mail ...”

“... loved the Ritz,’ her private secretary recalled. ‘She was looked after by beautifully dressed young men: the world wasn’t bothering her anymore.’ Thatcher spent the next three months in a suite that cost £3660 a night. She died in her bed on 8 April 2013 after suffering a massive stroke. According to her biographer Charles Moore, the bill for her ...”

“... MoD hadn’t puffed itself up in the first place. This is​ exactly what happened. When General Robert Fry, the MoD’s head of strategic planning, came up with Britain’s Afghanistan intervention plan in 2004, it was predicated on rapidly drawing down British forces in southern Iraq and shifting them to Helmand. Fry felt Britain had proved to the ...”

“... stuffy nursery cupboard with Boris, Michael, Nigel and their pals. England will become a place the young want to get out of, in search of fresh air and light.James ButlerThere is​ now a knot at the centre of British politics. If politicians push for inclusion in the European Economic Area, in the hope of stabilising the economy and avoiding a deep ...”

“... office in an age of strongmen, between Margaret Thatcher’s first election victory in 1979 and Robert Mugabe’s in 1980. Thirty-six years later Dos Santos is still in power. Under his supervision, Angola is not just a development star, but a model of elite self-enrichment and wealth disparity. There are now said to be seven thousand millionaires while ...”

“... indeterminacy of the central alter of the story: Albertine, projection of Proust’s love for a young man, obliged to acquire the image of a young woman, can never achieve resolution, remaining a vague blur, drained of substance by the prohibition Proust imposed on his creation.A sexual preference​ can be lived in any ...”

“... by the covenant of the League of Nations that Wilson winched into it. With British helpmeets – Robert Cecil, Walter Phillimore – assisting, it was this initiative that gave rise to the spirit of Geneva. Lauding the League as the first international organisation for peace in which smaller powers set the tone, Ghervas is at pains to clear it of customary ...”

“... recurring – to break out of their corner and restore relations with the United States. Women and young people, with their vigils for the American dead, express both an ardent sympathy for a loss they comprehend and an intense frustration with the stale taboos of a superannuated revolutionary culture. A raw and rattled US has responded with warmth. Iran, the ...”

“... evidence procured by Finn and Couvée, went largely unreported in the West. Long forgotten is Robert Conquest’s The Courage of Genius: The Pasternak Affair, published in 1961, as impartial an account as you could expect from someone who had been employed in the Foreign Office’s propaganda shop for more than a decade. Add to these Evgeny Pasternak’s ...”

“... Bindel called it in 2018 when the Olympic diver Tom Daley announced the arrival of his baby son, Robert, by paid surrogate in California. ‘The interface between extreme capitalism and patriarchy.’ It’s interesting, as Lewis is quick to notice, that the clouds of pale and puffy human-rights speak come spiked with moments of body horror, as though ...”

“... beauty, sweet reason must veil their heads, they must give way to arguments of power.’ Robert Graves writes in his autobiography that, back in the hills of Harlech, he found himself ‘still mentally and nervously organised for war’, automatically sizing up the landscape for places to site a Lewis-gun and provide cover for his rifle-grenade ...”