“... we hear the first chords of Bill Haley and the Comets. We find, too, the trenchant comments of Richard Hoggart, A.H. Halsey, Anthony Sampson and Michael Young – the Four Evangelists of the 1950s to whom Hennessy dedicates his book. Their increasingly grumpy pronouncements on the ‘shiny barbarism of the new affluence’ pepper the pages of Having It So ...”

“... TV expert and his colleagues prefer the old-fashioned panache of the boy from deepest Provence, Richard Virenque, who charges up the mountains with his tongue hanging out (and who is now signing autographs from the door of his bus), or the gleeful grimace of little Thomas Voeckler, the Tintinesque hero from Martinique known as ‘le p’tit Blanc’, who ...”

“... San Francisco. He got a great deal from his time with Winters and wrote about it at length in what may be his finest essay, ‘On a Drying Hill: Yvor Winters’. He wore glasses and smoked a pipe, and both of these adjuncts served to mask a face that was not in any case volatile. Pleased or displeased, he was most of the time thoughtfully of the same ...”

“... a dilettante and in the doldrums about cracking the code of American musical success, Porter told Richard Rodgers: ‘I’ll write Jewish tunes.’ In Porter’s shift to the heavily chromatic minor key with its unmistakable Mediterranean flavour, he found a rhythmic correlative which engineered the crossover to Broadway. ‘It is surely one of the ironies of ...”

“... could expand opportunities for all. Far from being fatalists and diehard enemies of progress, they may even have been overconfident about the power of democratically elected political authority to regulate the market for moral reasons, to reduce poverty, to increase educational opportunity, to avoid war. The real road to serfdom, according to Cold War liberals ...”

“... majoritarian tyranny and the triumph of the demagogue. In the hands of Cold War liberals, Richard Hofstadter chief among them, all of these disorders were understood as symptoms of populism. Worse still, populism had a latent propensity towards fascism or totalitarianism.Arthur Borriello and Anton Jäger know that, despite an enormous and growing ...”

“... moving back to Ireland but she returned from her last visit disheartened. It was too late. This may have been the final blow, for in the strange years in New York during which she found herself steadily more marginalised by her age and temperament and by the beginnings of illness, she sank deeper into her past. But it was a past whose landscape and ...”

“... since these intellectual entrepreneurs were determined to get ahead of the game – was Richard J. Herrnstein and Charles Murray’s The Bell Curve, published in 1994, which made the case that differences in IQ between racial groups should be factored into policy-making. But Slobodian shows that this was just the tip of a Mont Pelerin-sized ...”

“... bring peace to the realm. Those who supported Hugh no doubt hoped for political advantage; they may also have decided that he would be the more effective ruler. The legitimacy of his rule was challenged, not least in its first years, when a rebellion by the rejected Charles of Lorraine nearly succeeded in toppling him. But this needs to be set against the ...”

“... assumed that freer trade would sweep all before it, and force Russia to lower its tariffs. For Richard Cobden, opening the Ottoman Empire to European trade would nullify any threat from an increase of Russian influence there. Liberal cabinet ministers like the 3rd Earl Grey thought Russophobic press stories absurd, because Russia relied on physical ...”

“... as a writer and as a musician’ and his influence on her was of a deep and ambivalent kind that may have been partly responsible for difficulties in her subsequent relations with men. Sidonie, too, was revered and loved by Melanie, who in turn was doted on by the family in general, though she believed herself to have been an unplanned child. Her eldest ...”

“... at least until Peaky Blinders came along? In my experience, nobody, not even Oswald Mosley or Richard Nixon, was capable of radiating such unease in company. Harold Macmillan couldn’t stand having Powell opposite him in cabinet looking ‘like Savonarola eyeing one of the more disreputable popes’. So he relocated Enoch way down the table where he ...”

“... other iterations of palm oil, palm biofuel started off promising to be a virtuous substitute but may end up being as damaging as the thing it has replaced. When people started talking about ‘peak oil’ in the 1990s, many countries invested heavily in palm-oil-based agrofuels in the belief that they would be a carbon neutral or even carbon sequestering ...”

“... harmless. One was the rise and fall of Anglo-American literature. I use the term, in what may be too subjective a sense, to span the period from the birth of Whitman to the death of T.S. Eliot. It could be said that before Whitman, no American poet of real gifts wrote American literature; and after Eliot, none wrote anything else. Between these two ...”