“... with all this: most of it is both familiar and dated, like the Yellow Peril or the Decline of the West. Symons claims that Lewis was prophetically right about the demise of the family, unisex, and the immense growth of what Lewis called ‘associational life’, controlled by the internationals and the press. He was, however, ‘dramatically wrong’ about ...”

“... and unhappy, and was to end in divorce during the war, there is no evidence that it foundered on Anthony Powell’s law that envy rather than jealousy is the enemy of wedlock. Gumilev, who was shot by the Bolsheviks in 1921, was a highly peculiar but a generous man. His wife, who remarried twice, was not an easy woman. She was naturally grand. Tsvetaeva, who ...”

“... to murder Trotsky in Mexico, even though it was obvious that Trotskyism held little appeal for the West, while the domestic arm of the OGPU stamped out even the suggestion of support for Trotsky at home. Zionism – that is, Jews – became a major enemy in the latter years of Stalin’s reign, and a KGB purged of its Jewish members (the prohibition remains to ...”

“... continuity: ‘A biography of Ho Chi Minh.’ Did I read French? No. Vietnamese? No. ‘Well,’ Anthony Blond said thoughtfully, ‘you better start a crash course in French straight away and now let’s go back to my office and send Ho a telegram.’ We did. A month later there was an excited call from Blond. ‘Come to the office immediately. A ...”

“... necessities of the body.’ The transition to bodily inhibition took place quite slowly, however: Anthony Wood complained that when Charles II’s courtiers left Oxford, they also left ‘their excrements in every corner, in chimneys, studies, coal-houses, cellars’. True civility was the property of the city. ‘Since classical times,’ Thomas ...”

“... in 1958. Worst of all was the fact that he had chosen as his personal assistant his friend Anthony Blunt, to whom he confided the most sensitive tasks of all. What this meant was that absolutely everything of the slightest importance was going straight from Liddell’s desk to Beria and Stalin. Would the Americans ever trust the British again? Could ...”

“... recovered. ‘I am favourably impressed with General Wavell in many ways,’ Churchill wrote to Anthony Eden, ‘but I do not feel in him that sense of mental vigour and resolve to overcome obstacles, which is indispensable to successful war.’ John Colville, Churchill’s secretary, recorded that ‘Churchill tried his hardest to elicit the general’s ...”

“... In 1989, an earthquake in Tipasa, just west of Algiers, left thousands of people homeless. Three years later, another shook the densely packed outskirts of Cairo. In both cases, the state’s response was no better than it might have been in any developing country with high population concentrations and feeble services ...”

“... English it felt as if one smelled. To Tony Blair, though, it is of roses. Note how in the south-west even the humblest hamlet nowadays seems to boast a business park. 12 May, Long Crichel. Driving through rain-soaked Dorset we stop at Puddletown and the church there which is full of fixtures and character: a chantry chapel with alabaster tombs and the ...”

“... really gauged your cruelty or your recklessness.’ McCarthyism had been launched in Wheeling, West Virginia only four years earlier, in the speech where the senator claimed to have the names of 205 Communists employed by the State Department. No one then could have predicted his hold would break so soon. Yet the time of the fear lasted longer than the ...”

“... white blouse and pencil skirt: zakuski, borsch and dumplings. Our hosts were the lawyer and writer Anthony Julius, who said enigmatically that he had ‘committed himself’ to Dau, and one of the project’s producers, Susanne Marian. Khrzhanovsky wasn’t there; and although Julius had offered to arrange viewing of footage from the work in progress, it ...”

“... Porter; to John Cage’s poetry, Ezra Pound’s operas, the compositions of Christopher Fry or Anthony Burgess.) One of the aims of her study is to rescue Gurney’s later work from accusations of madness, and offer it as evidence of his experimental, even modernist, spirit.As a teenager, Gurney was a chorister at Gloucester Cathedral: his father was a ...”

“... for nomination as their prospective candidate. Though they knew he had done well in the recent West Birmingham by-election, they may still have had a few qualms when they saw their man in the flesh. A photograph reproduced in Tam Dalyell’s peculiar but highly entertaining memoir of Crossman gives some idea of what he might have looked like. It shows the ...”

“... artists (Bell, Cohen, Knight) or authors (Allingham, Blyton, Compton-Burnett, Sackville-West and Sitwell), topped off with occasional politicians (Astor, Bonham Carter and Lady Lloyd-George) and royals (Princess Marina, Queen Victoria Eugénie, the Princess Royal). Vera Brittain, Ivy Williams (‘the first woman to be called to the English ...”

“... was among the smoothest in Eastern Europe. Hungary spent the 1990s as a model pupil of the West, finally joining the EU in 2004. Now, almost a decade on, it is led by the charismatic, self-declared ‘right-wing plebeian’ Viktor Orbán, a man whom critics charge with the ‘Putinisation’ of Hungary. Thanks to his government’s undermining of the ...”