“... from industry and commerce, and encouraged them to look instead to the land, the Empire, the Civil Service or the professions. As a result there was a haemorrhage of talent from industry, the English entrepreneurial spirit was stifled and Britain’s economic growth was stunted. Rubinstein lists the main planks of the ‘cultural critique’: Britain was the ...”

“... unions had over three million members and were threatening a general strike; the size of the Civil Service had more than doubled between 1900 and 1914, mainly to administer Lloyd George’s welfare state. Individualism was just as much under attack from the right as the left, through calls for tariff reform and conscription, and the ‘national ...”

“... on YouTube, Karp throws his arms above his head and announces:We have dedicated our company to the service of the West and the United States of America. And we’re super-proud of the role we play, especially in places we can’t talk about … Palantir is here to disrupt and make the institutions we partner with the very best in the world, and when it’s ...”

“... part in this work.’ After the war he was chosen by the Americans to help democratise the civil service in Germany, and by Monnet to help draft the treaty establishing the Coal and Steel Community.That figures like these were the ornaments of Europe’s first Court of Justice reflected, of course, the closing of political ranks after the Cold War set ...”

“... we might walk out of the church and be hit by a car, and then where would we be? After the service, people came up to me and asked me how I had done in my school exams. If the answer was good, there would be an earnest hug, and a bellowed ‘Praise the Lord!’ Nothing was too small for the Lord’s attention. There were many good and kind people in ...”

“... Philby was all right. ‘I still feel,’ he said, ‘Philby some day will head the British service.’ All doubt was removed in 1963 when Philby defected to Russia, one jump ahead of investigators. By that time Angleton had been chief of the CIA’s Counterintelligence Staff for nearly a decade. What he felt about Philby’s betrayal may only be ...”

“... well-known fact that all a working man would ever do with a large award of damages was buy a pub. Robert Stevens in a footnote cites a nice antidote from a law lord in 1833: ‘Here is a contract made by a fishmonger and a carrier of fish who know their business, and whether it is just and reasonable is to be settled by me who am neither fishmonger nor ...”

“... newspaper pundits have created persistent legends; and it is to combat one of these legends that Robert Ferrell has edited Eisenhower’s diaries. Professor Ferrell is not the first historian who has sought to show that the General-President, far from being a confused nonentity, was, on the contrary, a hard-working, shrewd and purposive leader who ...”

“... but even more a Dudley, grandson of the ill-fated Duke of Northumberland and nephew of his sons Robert, Elizabeth’s Earl of Leicester, and Ambrose, Earl of Warwick. Ambrose was childless and, for as many years as Queen Elizabeth neither married Robert nor released him to marry anyone else, he was the presumed heir of ...”

“... around. They are, no doubt, in their cars, and another poet of weirdness, New England weirdness, Robert Lowell, knew also about cars: ‘A savage servility slides by on grease.’ There are antique shops in Stockbridge, where antique seems to mean the day before yesterday. And grand white wooden houses, behind evergreen trees, houses which turn out to be ...”

“... shaped by the war, for a boarding school education at the hands of teachers who had experienced ‘service’: ‘The world war remained a presence, a shadow, but also a light, the source of virtue and meaning.’ The headmaster is a ‘genial, decent bumbling sort of fellow, a rugby blue who was known to call his wife by the name of George’. These teachers ...”

“... the 1950s, edited by D.J. Enright, appeared in 1955, followed a year later by New Lines, edited by Robert Conquest. Enright’s volume contained work by eight poets: Robert Conquest, D.J. Enright, Kingsley Amis, Donald Davie, John Holloway, Elizabeth Jennings, Philip Larkin and John Wain, to which list Conquest’s volume ...”

“... and shot by a firing squad, two at a time. There were five British victims: four Gibraltarians and Robert Boyd, a young Irish officer of the Bengal Army who’d put up most of the cash, hoping for a glamorous alternative to service in India as a grandee in Torrijos’s Spain. He was better treated, though, than Lorca would ...”

“... heart of the Museum. His favourite seat is said to have been number L13.This last detail is not in Robert Henderson’s book, which leads me to wonder whether it’s wrong. Henderson, a former Russian curator at the British Library, knows everything there is to know about Lenin’s love affair with the BM, and tells it all. This is a level of detailed ...”

“... who came to Wimpole Street in 1844, was privy to her mistress’s clandestine love affair with Robert Browning (and was one of only two witnesses to her marriage) and accompanied her to Italy with a bravery which Elizabeth Barrett Browning acknowledged in the very last words of her last letter to Browning on the eve of their elopement. ‘Wilson has been ...”