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“... in politics. Not that the Young Conservatives were aimless sybarites. To the Tory journalist Frank Johnson they were just as zealous in their own way as Maoists – ‘a ruthless organisation dedicated to one fanatical aim: marriage’. Tim Bale’s latest book, The Conservatives since 1945, examines the motors of change within the party at every level from ...”

“... partly for formal experimentation whose work Wolff did include (among them Lorrie Moore, Denis Johnson and Mary Robison) did not, in the stories Wolff selected, engage with the question of how a story convinces us of its reality. This is not to say that the stories Wolff selected were not interesting stories. Rather, it became abundantly clear that he had ...”

“... and Herculaneum began to re-emerge in recognisable detail. For the generation that shared with Dr Johnson a growing taste for history writing that eschewed the ‘huge canvasses’ of David Hume in favour of more intimate details ‘applicable to private life’, the emerging streets and houses and the evidence of ...”

“... late 20th century. And some of his most characteristic tropes found distinguished copyists: Philip Johnson, for example, created an extraordinarily Soanean New York synagogue in the 1950s, and referred disarmingly to ‘the most cuddly, marvellous feeling’ of imitating Soane. Even more strikingly, Soane has been conscripted into the genealogy of modern ...”

“... be more empowering than to sit looking at an immaculate rectangle of water, a three-dimensional David Hockney which will never be disturbed by a thrashing alien presence? Neighbours lacking this obscene quantum of liquidity might well complain about the noise, the dust, the inconvenience and the damage to their foundations. It doesn’t signify. And ...”

“... rather than padlock themselves to the gates of Downing Street. Strangest of all, in September 2015 David Cameron wrote to the Conservative leader of Oxfordshire County Council to complain about cuts it had recently announced: I was disappointed at the long list of suggestions floated in the briefing note to make up significant cuts to frontline services ...”

“... across their ancient homeland. Hämäläinen relates the account given to the English explorer David Thompson by one of the Blackfeet Indians, Saahkómaapi. In around 1730, the Blackfeet heard that there were horses in Snake Indian country and that not far away was the body of a horse that had been killed by an arrow. They found the dead horse and gathered ...”

“... raced to meet the expectations of their followers. (Unlike most governments, as the historian David Renton points out, the fascist parties in Italy and Germany became more radical once in office.) Fascism involves a form of collective behaviour that seems unaccountable. Many in the interwar period were slow to recognise the danger it posed, seeing fascism ...”

“... get high on his own supply. Cataclysms like Brexit, and politicians like Jacob Rees-Mogg and Boris Johnson, are what happens when an entire country gets high on its own supply, but everyone else stopped buying long ago. I was in Brussels recently, taking my son to watch Anderlecht play, when I heard some English people in a café asking the waiter why no one ...”

“... already complied with it when they ceded a few thousand square miles of sand to Egypt in the Camp David Accords. Still, the West Bank and Gaza Strip today contain more than a million and a half Palestinians who, under international law and the rules of the United Nations, are clearly entitled to create their own national state, just as Israel was permitted to ...”

“... intelligence has frequently been disregarded or ignored by decision-makers.’ Despite President Johnson’s and, still more, President Nixon’s interest in covert action, neither of them – in Mr Laqueur’s view – thought very highly of the intelligence community. If secret intelligence has not had a greater influence on policy, it is at least partly ...”

“... occasionally parse but often convey no recoverable meaning? The alleged brilliance of these men David Halberstam once called ‘the best and the brightest’ is rarely in evidence. The discussions in the week before and the week after Kennedy’s quarantine speech had none of the intellectual rigour of proper debate, nor even the rough-and-tumble but ...”

“... adopted it in a decorous shape for his longest and most ambitious work, The Moralists. David Hume, whom Diderot befriended in Paris in the 1760s, used it to scandalously sceptical effect in his Dialogues concerning Natural Religion, unpublishable until after his death. Diderot’s most famous work is a dialogue: Rameau’s Nephew, in which a ...”

“... and against such a claim there can be no appeal. (The idealist can always sweetly point out to Dr Johnson, nursing his foot, that he never disputed that the idea of a stone involved the ideas of solidity and impenetrability.) Keen to free criticism from a pure textualism, Hamilton wants to get some substance, some matter, back into the great game; he wants to ...”

“... said that, for all our uncertainty, we have a pretty good fix on the basic nature of the physical. David Lewis once claimed that ‘the physical nature of ordinary matter under mild conditions is very well understood.’ But this isn’t true. It isn’t true even when we put aside the point that the known phenomena of experience are wholly a matter of the ...”