“... was the name Rand gave to the system of philosophy she developed in a 30,000-word speech that took her two years to write and which forms the centrepiece of her bestselling novel, Atlas Shrugged (1957). It was later elaborated in speeches, lectures and interviews, in the six non-fiction books Rand published in her lifetime, and a further dozen-odd ...”

“... to marry them. In Lichfield, the geographical centre of Middle England, a statue of Captain Edward John Smith of the Titanic stands in a park bestowing dangerous blessings on newly-wed couples emerging from the nearby register office. In McKie’s version of England the past is generally not allowed to assert itself as a moral yardstick, a measure of decline ...”

“... left – does. Jeremy Corbyn is out of the party and won as an independent at the last election; John McDonnell had the whip suspended in July for voting against the new Labour government to scrap the two-child limit for Universal Credit or child tax credits; Ken Livingstone has Alzheimer’s. Their shared mentor, Tony Benn, is long dead. Beckett is an ...”

“... well-known cultural figures who had been his friends (Dylan Thomas, George Orwell, Eric Gill and John Middleton Murry), evoking them first separately and then in some slightly dizzying comparisons: I had seen Murry working, happily absorbed and with real skill, mending fences, sawing up logs (once, too absorbed), laying down barrels of Sauerkraut, cutting ...”

“... at all between knowing you want to pee and then just peeing. I was at Plimpton’s funeral in St John the Divine not long ago, and they sat me near the front, you know. Suddenly, I had to go. I knew I wasn’t gonna make it all the way down the aisle so I spotted a little side door and I got the canes and nipped in there. Halfway down the corridor, I was ...”

“... Connecticut. There he built the family hacienda, Great Elm, staffed it with Mexican servants, took out a large loan from a French bank and settled down to raise a family in which William Jr, born in 1925, was the sixth of ten children.Great Elm was a hive of reaction. At the dinner table William Jr excelled at parroting his father’s opinions. The ...”

“... Mastership of Trinity, practised critical scholarship in his commentary on Marcus Aurelius, and John Pearson, an eminent theologian, who was successively Master of Jesus, Master of Trinity and Bishop of Chester, displayed it in brilliant emendations of the text of Aeschylus. In 1662 Richard Bentley, one of the greatest critical scholars, was born near ...”

“... VII and Prince Charles may be added the names of every long-suffering heir since the Hanoverians took over: George II, George IV and Edward VIII, not forgetting poor Prince Frederick, the son of George II and father of George III, who did not survive to reign at all. Whatever their differences of character and temperament, all of them had to confront the ...”

“... done when the Sun was new and its light faint: too faint to keep water from freezing. No wonder it took 3.5 billion years to get as far as blundering bipeds with sharp stones in their hands.This story – pieced together only in the later years of this century, to a large extent in the wake of planetary exploration – was part of the mythology of the ‘blue ...”

“... by his translation of the Austrian folk tale Bambi, which carried a moist Foreword from John Galsworthy.) This was the literary bridge that carried Chambers from relative hackdom on the Daily Worker to pre-eminence at the Stalinist flagship of letters, The New Masses. Indeed it was his usefulness and ability in this department that got him ...”

“... In so far as there was a shared response to Hart Crane’s poetry after his suicide in 1932, it took the form of invidious comparisons. ‘Crane had the sensibility typical of Baudelaire,’ R.P. Blackmur wrote in 1935, ‘and so misunderstood himself that he attempted to write The Bridge as if he had the sensibility typical of Whitman ...”

“... and a piping bullfinch. Masters tells us that one of her husband’s pets, an Amazon parrot, took a personal dislike to her. It wasn’t much of a life – despised by a parrot, kept sitting in the dark each evening while the animals slept, and married in name only – but better things were in store for Lois, who left London in 1940 to take up a post as ...”

“... They served at the pleasure of their sovereigns and not a minute longer. After all, it only took the young Kaiser Wilhelm II a stroke of the pen to dismiss the great Bismarck who had served his grandfather for 26 years. Hersh is right to say that Kissinger understood the terms of his employment: ‘Henry Kissinger entered the White House on Inauguration ...”

“... consciousness of children makes them peculiarly susceptible to physical humiliation. Juniors took baths, one every three days, in a scruffy little room, four baths standing like islands on its stained red lino floor. We were washed and dried with detached vigour and once a fortnight our hair was washed with a harsh-smelling medicated shampoo, and our ...”

“... go wrong and absorb more forces ... quote a strong body wanted just to leave it on one side. But John Fieldhouse and I were quite keen to have a go because we thought we could do it and also felt we needed a success. We hadn’t many successes politically. We also needed a success militarily to get Ministers to believe in what are could do because a lot of ...”