“... of the Gaullists – which I was instructed to smuggle home among my shirts and hand over to Mr Anthony Eden. A little later, I met the most enchanting and Candidean of my French relations. He had been in trouble as early as 1940 for shouting ‘Vive la Pologne!’ when charging with the bayonet – on the grounds that this was a war declared on behalf of ...”

“... shows in the choice of musicals above all. The only musicals to get in are Singing in the Rain and West Side Story rather than films starring Ginger Rogers or Judy Garland or Rita Hayworth or Barbra Streisand, or films choreographed by Busby Berkeley, with his unique combination of low popular appeal and high cinematic art. Thomson is passionately ...”

“... Joseph Sturge, William Morgan and John Angell James); major cultural figures such as Anthony Trollope, Thomas Carlyle and John Stuart Mill, all of whom took part in the public debate about the events in Jamaica; as well as officers, scribes, landowners, creolised whites, metropolitan intellectuals. Like her Baptist missionaries, they all became ...”

“... invited to jump the editorial immigration queue. At six times fewer pages than the next entry (Anthony Thwaite), the answer may be that his is a tourist visa. As their titles suggest, geography is equally crucial to the trade war pitting Longman against Norton. Given the inevitable overlap between their contents, it may be all that allows some harried ...”

“... Lauren, ‘the first designer to base a fashion philosophy on American history. He took the Wild West of cowboys and homesteaders, the Native Americans and their traditional crafts skills, the Long Island Edwardian country life of the Vanderbilts and the Whitneys, the American dream of 1930s movies – and added the ice-cool sophistication of Manhattan in ...”

“... was taken on as a junior assistant (darkroom duties and layout), the magazine’s great days under Anthony Sampson and Sylvester Stein – and the energetic assistant editor Henry Nxumalo, who was murdered on an investigative assignment – were coming to an end. Stein’s successor, Tom Hopkinson, was a more cautious editor, but Drum had assembled some of the ...”

“... was no use, and he announced his resignation on 7 July 2022.‘Rarely in three hundred years,’ Anthony Seldon and Raymond Newell conclude,and never since 1916 has a prime minister been so poor at appointments, so incompetent at running cabinet government or so incapable of finding a stable team to run Number 10. The prime minister is the chief ...”

“... an earlier American progenitor, as if Whitman’s vast landscape could just occasionally stretch west through the dying day into God. The three prose writers I began from – dramatist, novelist and crime writer – are all from their own angles defining 20th-century America as a distracted public. The OED glosses ‘distraction’ as ‘violent stretching ...”

“... contradiction. The one-sided social advances of Communism, plus minimal information about the West, would lead to disenchantment, and eventually to implosion. This alone would be good reason for heeding what Todd now writes about the West itself. When La Chute finale appeared, the table-thumping realists of the day had ...”

“... also embraced a more old-fashioned brand of politics – he’d walk through the hallways of the West Wing, stopping to talk to people, gripping your forearm and holding onto it as he spoke.’ Whereas Hillary offers advice that often seems technically correct but is painfully convoluted – of the Afghan war, she tells the president that ‘putting in ...”

“... reversal would inevitably raise a question which could in time become as intractable as the ‘West Lothian question’ with which Tam Dalyell harried successive generations of Labour politicians in debates about devolution. If the UK repeals the Human Rights Act, but leaves in place the European system which allows alleged victims of breaches of the ...”

“... Augustus William Wilke, was banished from the grounds of Hastings Museum to a corner of the West Marina Gardens in St Leonards-on-Sea adequate to its transcendent obscurity. The decaying low-baroque tableau of conjugal tenderness, features eaten away by the syphilis of time, played so well, on an anvil of whitewashed cement, alongside a municipal ...”

“... them to devotion, not the real Russia they had failed to save. As a child of exile, Metropolitan Anthony Bloom, recalls, ‘we lived Russia, dreamed Russia, waking and sleeping.’ Asked when he would take out French papers, Bloom remembers replying that he wanted to remain Russian and would prefer to die in Russia than to endure eternal exile abroad. Yet ...”

“... farm labourer who found his way via Dollar Academy to a double first at Balliol, he edited Anthony à Wood and Aubrey’s Brief Lives and then turned to the history of Essex, sending volume after volume of notes to the Bodleian. Devoted to what he called ‘the remarkable history’ of his own ‘most interesting parish’, in 1914 he began to record ...”

“... affinity between the two as analysts of ‘modernity’, of the distinctiveness of the West, of the role of the world religions, and as philosophers of social-scientific method. The comparison becomes almost a reflex in John Hall’s outstanding biography: ‘Gellner’s understanding and account of modern cognition were profoundly ...”