“... Swept away by Hellman’s memoirs in high school – she regards the older woman as ‘brave and strong and full of noble ideals’ – she forms a desperate wish to meet her. She writes her a letter, asking if she can work for her for the summer, and to her amazement Hellman accepts the offer. All then is giddy alacrity. Like Jane Eyre setting off for ...”

“... never engaged in such acts of militancy, the experience of one of the two white characters has strong echoes of her own: ‘She would not have been here if she had not found her own re-education, after the school where she had sung for God to save white South Africa.’ Placing the tale of the terrorists in tandem with that of an escaped baboon from a ...”

“... row of public toilets. In the kingdom at large, Wahhabi doctrine is enforced by the five thousand-strong religious police force – known as the mutawaeen – controlled by the Commission for the Promotion of Virtue and Prevention of Vice. These religious thugs, institutional descendants of the Ikhwan stormtroopers, patrol cities in expensive white SUVs ...”

“... for a presidency so cynical and void of ideas. Barre or Rocard, admired by the Fondation Saint-Simon, would have been preferable.Behind this disaffection, however, lay a deeper doubt about the direction that French public life was taking. Already by the late 1980s, Furet had started to express reservations about the discourse of human rights that was ...”

“... upon them as practical behaviour by wives, midwives and nurses. The recent book by A.L. Rowse upon Simon Forman, a popular and successful medical practitioner, shows him treating the belief as a matter of course. To discover that your baby is a moron is a slow, painful process, and the men cannot feel it decent to interfere with any palliation for the mother ...”

“... point in waiting for that. Anderson traces this ‘technocratic line’ back to the work of Saint-Simon in the early 19th century. As Anderson writes, ‘it was enough that Europe itself should be secured from war, and devoted to the growth of industry and the progress of science, for the well-being of all its classes.’ Whatever its ancestry, the assumption ...”

“... Self as a ‘stylisation of freedom’, produced out of an ‘aesthetics of existence’. When Simon Schama, in the overture to The Embarrassment of Riches, finds himself rather unconcerned about the actual existence of ‘the drowning cell’, in which, according to travellers’ tales, the incorrigibly idle were required to pump themselves away from ...”

“... Opencast Operators, as well as a directorship with National Telecable, the US group which has strong disagreements with government policy in the field of fibre-optics, in which area Leigh had been involved when a minister. Nicholas Scott has consoled himself since his departure from office with a consultancy with Clark and Smith Industries, whose products ...”

“... he had to make a speech. He was not constituted for confrontation. His voice, people said, was not strong; so it was up to him to create, in those halls of the Revolution with their disastrous acoustics, a climate in which he would command a hushed assent.In 1789 he was elected to the Estates General and went to Versailles. In the National Assembly which ...”

“... not only with little instinct for the art of politics, but also incapable of recognising the strong limitations and biases of her own worldview. After a series of crushing parliamentary defeats she was forced out, and replaced by Boris Johnson, who promised to exit on the planned date of 31 October whether or not there was a deal with the EU: ‘no ...”

“... a maddening book to read, and only someone who knows the biographies of Welles by Charles Higham, Simon Callow and others is likely to guess what Conrad is up to and why. Yet he is also writing criticism. Here the difference should matter between a line written as a writer writes and a line spoken as an actor reads. Even in a study like this (a scrambled ...”

“... they buy the services, rather than being cast as monopoly suppliers’ – check. ‘Another very strong idea is that money follows patients’ – check. ‘Pay hospitals prospectively by diagnosis-related groups as our Medicare programme does’ – check. ‘Self-governing NHS trusts’ – check. What seems to have happened since 1985 is that Enthoven’s ...”

“... it’s a more visceral word, impossible to say without some amount of feeling, and conveys a strong reaction to what it generally disdains to name (indeed stresses its unnameability). Deep down the disgust is surely focused on the bodily facts of sex between men. ‘Filthy’, of course, occurring six times in each of Parker’s volumes, has a moral ...”

“... when it came to the primary political battle of her life, which was to defeat socialism. When Simon Jenkins, then the editor of the Times, went to interview Thatcher at Chequers in the run-up to the leadership contest, he saw a copy of Heseltine’s latest book on the coffee table, stuffed with post-it notes. She told him she had been marking up what she ...”