“... by Apollo 11’s commander). Apollo 11’s commander, Neil Armstrong, took saying less to what we may as well call cosmic extremes. He went silent, became absent, allegedly working but never seen, the J.D. Salinger of the US space programme. The race for the Moon was fuelled by a terrifying combustion of scientific know-how and political paranoia. But the ...”

“... himself no longer. I was in Downing Street with the prime minister’s foreign affairs adviser, David Manning; the overcoated figure bursting into our meeting was Jack Straw. He wanted to tell Manning that he had persuaded Joschka Fischer, the German foreign minister, to add Hamas to the EU list of terrorist movements. His tale of his conversion of Fischer ...”

“... birthday: ‘A ranking of New York writers came out on the internet. You were ranked thirty, and David Remnick was eight positions ahead of you. Philip Gourevitch was ranked number eleven. They are both ahead of you.’ Nina, pulling her son aside during the same dinner: ‘It seems like you don’t really know me.’ Semyon, again to Shteyngart’s ...”

“... which is where you’ll be shopping if you decide to follow your dream of becoming the next David Foster Wallace – who did have to work, incidentally, like the rest of us. (At Pomona College, Foster Wallace’s ‘Prose Fiction’ class consisted entirely of getting students to read mass-market bestsellers.) Why are there no great novelists any ...”

“... almost parodically English figure whose output includes a cultural history of polar exploration (I May Be Some Time, 1996), a memoir of childhood reading (The Child that Books Built, 2002), a study of various unsung successes of postwar British science (Backroom Boys, 2003) and a non-fiction novel that unpacks the story of Soviet economics (Red ...”

“... what amounted to pocket money. (He did better in this respect than the feeble-minded Mr Dick of David Copperfield, who is supplied with pocket money but not allowed to spend it.) Not long after becoming third earl, he fled from home for a brief period in the company of his Swiss valet, though whether this was an abduction or an elopement is hard to say. The ...”

“... What​ you can paint depends on what you are allowed to see, which may be controlled by regulation or social convention. So, for instance, at the Paris Opéra in the 1870s, women were not under any circumstances permitted to sit in the orchestre. And they could only sit in the parterre, or rear stalls, if accompanied by a man ...”

“... to murder, and numerous counts of arson, kidnapping and assault. Haggarty was released in May 2018, after four months’ imprisonment. Leahy picks out the case of Denis Donaldson, a member of Sinn Féin who was recruited as an informer by the RUC Special Branch. He was arrested in 2002 by the PSNI (which had replaced the RUC the year before) for ...”

“... powers – ‘one of the worst and one of the most influential ideas around’, in the opinion of David Starkey in 2019. Hobbes describes it in Leviathan as ‘a doctrine, plainly, and directly against the essence of a Common-wealth … That the sovereign power may be divided. For what is it to divide the Power of a ...”

“... England, Indian food was thought to be anything sprinkled with curry powder: a substance Elizabeth David described as ‘unlikeable, harshly flavoured, and possessed of an aroma clinging and as all-pervading in its way as that of English boiled cabbage or cauliflower’. ‘To me the word “curry” is as degrading to India’s great cuisine as the term ...”

“... section of Tenured Radicals to the de Man affair, as an academic cover-up of Watergate dimensions. David Lehman’s Signs of the Times – reviewed here not long ago by Claude Rawson – is a narrative and meditation on the same subject. The tone is less enjoyably sarcastic than Kimball’s, but Lehman too is convinced that the de Man case is symptomatic of a ...”

“... author stands. The curiously affectless tone of the narrative – even in its tragic climax – may be something aimed at, or it may indicate some failure to achieve the exact tone Scruton wants. Whatever, Francesca leaves the reader stimulated, mildly infuriated, and seriously baffled. ‘Final exams were ...”

“... violent – the belief in race and nation. Riddle? Farce? Silence? The regimes of Eastern Europe may have been oppressive and iniquitous, but the fiction and poetry written under them were for a time quite outstanding. This was partly because of the system, which was oddly literary in outlook and valued writers, though of course not as much as ...”

“... retained the mind-set of the inter-war years and saw no need for radical change. And what, it may be asked, was wrong with that? These people (few of whom in fact had ‘upper class’ backgrounds) were impregnated with the kind of social conscience that had become commonplace among the professional classes since the days of ‘New Liberals’ like ...”

“... were more likely to think of themselves as ‘Reformed’ than as ‘Calvinist’. The latter term may fit church discipline better than doctrine, and make better sense when applied to the presbyterian system which Calvin offered Europe as an alternative to episcopacy. Yet Calvinist ecclesiology played only a restricted part in the most potently ...”