“... her quick wit, but he compensates with a trademark hairdo like no other on Japanese screens. As a young man, he had long, straight black hair, but the Koizumi of recent years sports a permanent-waved, steel-grey mane covering his ears and tumbling down to his collar, the inspiration of Teruo Nakagomi, a trendy hair stylist in his constituency. Koizumi ...”

“... Even before then, he could be a superb poet of what we are pleased to call immaturity, creating young people at once touchingly needy, quite serious and crashingly ridiculous: However the mounting wail of adolescence crashes upon the amusement park he is not confused, the boy, he is not discountenanced by any number of silences or natural events like ...”

“... the early 1990s: Foucault, she said, had been deported because of his homosexual activities with young students. I still have no idea which version is correct. At the time of the Paris seminar, he told me he had just returned from a sojourn in Iran as a special envoy of Corriere della sera. ‘Very exciting, very strange, crazy,’ I recall him saying about ...”

“... Middle Ages,’ she observed, ‘powerful men have covered their throats.’ The anthropologist David Givens, coiner of the important term ‘neck dimple’ for the area concealed by the tie, saw the moment of the exposed male throat as a true paradigm shift. ‘In the old days of just a few years ago, you had to look powerful in business. But now ...”

“... quotes the half-drunken Leskov as having said: ‘Thee I anoint with oil, even as Samuel anointed David … You must write.’ Like so much else in Chekhov’s work, his relation to religion is ambiguous. In a letter to Diaghilev a year before his death, he wrote: ‘I can only regard with bewilderment an educated man who is also religious.’ But while ...”

“... mother was not Hildegard was hardly coincidental. Supported by ‘a very large number of nobles young as well as old’, the rebel son planned to kill his father and Hildegard’s sons. When Charlemagne had crushed the revolt, he held a big assembly of ‘Franks and other faithful ones’ at Regensburg, Tassilo’s former capital, where death sentences were ...”

“... January, they have been managed by a new Task Force Europe, led by Johnson’s chief negotiator, David Frost, a burly, acerbic diplomat, one of the few in the Foreign Office who has always loathed the EU. Frost’s conversations with Michel Barnier have become openly bitter and recriminatory, in a way not seen before. Frost is backed up by contemptuous ...”

“... finding the experience particularly off-putting. That wasn’t true of some of their peers. David Bomberg, a far greater artist (his Ronda Bridge from 1935, reproduced here, leaps out from the page), would later exhibit with the AIA, but he was deeply unnerved by his own visit to the Soviet Union in the early 1930s and kept his distance from the ...”

“... palace coup in Oman in 1970 and – last but not least – three abortive plots, farmed out to David Stirling and sundry other mercenaries under the initially benevolent eye of Western intelligence services, to overthrow the Gaddafi regime between 1971 and 1973 in an episode known as the Hilton Assignment. At the same time, the story of Libya in 2011 gives ...”

“... need to be housed) and low (people can’t afford the prices) at the same time.When I spoke to David O’Leary, executive director of the Home Builders Federation, a few months after Starmer took office, he was enthusiastic about Labour’s efforts. ‘What the government has done so far is more than we could have expected them to have done. They’ve ...”

“... as well as in person. The judge was swearing in a Russian interpreter on speakerphone while a young couple from Kyrgyzstan appeared huddled on a screen. After some back and forth, the judge gave the couple’s attorney a date for 2028, when ‘their comments about their government’ would be assessed. The Department of Homeland Security, in the person of ...”

“... strange being alone with these two books; even the names of the poets – Charles Tomlinson, or David Gascoyne, or Robert Conquest, or John Holloway, or Christopher Middleton, or Geoffrey Hill – stood for a world that was fully England. Looking at the list of poets was like having one’s Irish nose pushed up against the polished glass of a posh window in ...”

“... in which the likes of Kim Philby were likely to thrive. For the two changes worked together: the young intellectual recruits as a class tended to feel contemptuous, even angry, at their elders’ continuing obsession with the Bolshevik menace to the virtual exclusion of the threat posed by the Nazis. One of the most interesting passages in Glees’s book is ...”

“... chat to whomever was around or just people-watch. In this millennium, in cafés frequented by young white people, every customer seems to be silently staring at an Apple product, so that the places look and feel like offices. Even this phase may be on the way out. The next phase – of trying to keep customers from sticking around – has arrived. A food ...”

“... and rewarding ‘random’ online mentions. The target audience is mostly, though not only, young people, and not just on the right. During the build-up to the New York Knicks’s NBA championship win in June, M.D. Hossain, a 23-year-old fan, became instantly famous when a video of him shouting ‘My mayor’s Muslim. My bagel’s Jewish. My ...”