“... style was central to the Kennedy vision of power: the President had to take on Nixon, take on Big Steel, take on Castro, and take on Khrushchev, as personal adversaries to be vanquished in a contest of manhood. ‘Power was one,’ writes Wills, ‘power over women, power over Khrushchev.’ The case in which Kennedy’s philosophy of daring is most clearly ...”

“... Water Lillies (1914-26) float exactly three floors above Equal (2015), four great stacks of two steel blocks each by Richard Serra (for obvious reasons neither will be moved anytime soon).Michael Kimmelman, architecture critic at the New York Times, calls the new design ‘smart, surgical, sprawling and slightly soulless’. I would take ‘slightly ...”

“... at last perfectly illustrates both the universal dilemma and the general solution, this riddle in steel and stone is at once the perfect target and the perfect demonstration of non-violence, of racial brotherhood, this lofty target scraping the skies and meeting the destroying planes halfway, home of all people and all nations, capital of everything, housing ...”

“... describes her mastectomy without anaesthetic as ‘the most terrifying pain ... when the dreadful steel was plunged into the breast – cutting through veins – arteries – flesh – nerves’, we can vicariously share that horror. But what of that dauntless early Victorian intellectual, Harriet Martineau? She took to her bed for five years, complaining of ...”

“... 11.45 a.m. two military helicopters landed outside the army barracks in Târgoviste, a bleak steel town 120 kilometres north of Bucharest built in the brutal style favoured by etc, etc.’ Yet he also provides a continuous, highly readable flow of detail. Some of it is unfamiliar to the general public, if not to the experts who have tunnelled through the ...”

“... to law. To name names is invidious, but the one that irrepressibly suggests itself is that of Ronald Dworkin, whose claim to be the doyen of the legalist school is probably the strongest. Dworkin, who’s never been one to see the difference between magisterial prose and a sound argument, is an exponent of a secular natural law jurisprudence in which ...”

“... Clifton White, the political strategist who engineered the Goldwater nomination in 1964) had hoped Ronald Reagan would be the nominee, the party quickly coalesced around Nixon, who sailed to victory in the primaries. He was no one’s idea of a dream candidate. He had lost a presidential election once before, in 1960, albeit by the narrowest of margins. He was ...”

“... writing: ‘Long before Cincinnati’s triumph could occur, the highways of America turned to steel, and Chicago, the junction point of the rail system and the Great Lakes, became the city of promise, the place “about to become” or “sure to become” the key city of the Midwest. Later, the highways of the country turned to concrete and ...”

“... the titanium industry, pharmaceuticals, fishing, the import-export business, printing, steel, agricultural products and banking. These interests are organised under a plethora of labels (including such typical Moonie appellations as One Up Inc., Uniworld and Happy World Inc.), and Boyer does a heroic job in trying to enumerate them – by 1985 ...”

“... Stalin implicitly claimed. A saviour was needed, to lead the people back to life, as a new Tsar of steel had been needed, at least by the inherent logic of the Bolshevik ethos, to fuse the national sense of purpose, the will to drive towards the industrial future. On several occasions Pasternak insisted that there could, as it were, be only one true artist at ...”

“... the villain’s moustache he had grown, he told Malcolm Muggeridge in 1940, in imitation not of Ronald Colman but of Friedrich Nietzsche, whom he adored and to whom he bore a resemblance. Above all, that harsh, thrilling, unnaturally slowed-down voice. Has anyone else ever made the loveable Brummie accent sound sinister, at least until Peaky Blinders came ...”

“... president to evoke a mixture of outrage, horror and derision both at home and abroad. Both Ronald Reagan and George W. Bush were accused, in their time, of endangering the legitimacy of the American world order. The cultural conservatism and overt nationalism of the American right is fiercely at odds with bien pensant global opinion. This culture clash ...”

“... Nonconformist, she was no better pleased when he formed a close affection for one of his tutors, Ronald Knox, who came within an inch of converting Macmillan to Catholicism. The war saved him from taking this step, which would almost certainly have prevented him from becoming prime minister. In his last letter to Knox before leaving for France, he ...”

“... at the Regency Hotel until the apartment was ready, and courted wealthy Jewish New Yorkers like Ronald Lauder, who introduced him to other millionaires, among them Donald Trump. Although not religious himself, he forged an alliance with the Lubavitcher leader Menachem Mendel Schneerson, who welcomed him at his Brooklyn residence and commanded him to ...”

“... There was almost no answering fire.LST 301 was among the first vessels to go ashore, its massive steel doors wide open and its landing ramp fully extended beyond the bow. Major Bill Kerr, commander of 265 Battery and my father’s friend, stood on the lip of the ramp. When he felt the ship’s stern shudder as it scraped the bottom, he stepped forward into ...”