“... miles from any other major town. Here Nazarbayev has built a presidential palace larger than the White House. With money no object, the president had no difficulty in recruiting top architects like Norman Foster, who designed the 62-metre-high pyramid known as the Palace of Peace and Reconstruction. The city is built in a ...”

“... He knew how to impress them. In February 1962, when Jackie Kennedy made her television tour of the White House, Capote wrote to the Deweys: Yes, I knew Jackie was doing the TV tour, and am delighted to hear it was such a success: it was very thoughtful of you to write to her, Marie. She knows all about the Dewey family – we’ve discussed you at length. She ...”

“... that I saw him in grainy photos posted by ex-pupils on Friends Reunited. Was he not the boy in the white shirt at the edge of a photograph taken in front of the school in 1980, with kids tumbling over each other and somebody spraying from a shook-up can?He tended to do well in class but on a report card for July 1978 you can see things were changing. His ...”

“... where, without conquering the proud hearts, or gaining the warm affections of the Irish, the Anglo-Norman barons, who, with mailed hearts as well as backs – neither civilising nor enriching the country – resided amongst us.’It is clear that Wilde is aware of the difficulties inherent in any effort to describe the Irish landscape with political ...”

“... spy is treated as simple fact, as is his claim that FDR’s most trusted adviser. Harry Dexter White, the founder of the IMF and the World Bank, was also working for the Kremlin. The intellectual level of the book is perhaps best illustrated by Pincher’s laborious attempt to construct a mathematical equation to explain treason. The equation, in case LRB ...”

“... took something of the same form.) Incidentally, Perry Anderson’s general matrix of the ‘White’ intellectual emigration, which suggested that the radical exiles went to America while the conservative ones – with Gellner exempted – settled in England, understates the manner in which Berlin’s Washington period was the making of him.Berlin’s ...”

“... tarmac of derelict streets. The sandpiper isn’t a creature of asphalt and paving. It’s a small white-breasted bird usually to be found foraging on British foreshores in groups of twenty or so, scuttling up and down sandy beaches as the foaming forward edge of the sea roars in and hisses back. I’d come to Grimsby to see why, after seventy years of voting ...”

“... disappearing all over the city, none more shockingly than Pennsylvania Station, a McKim, Meade and White structure as imposing as the Colosseum. It disappeared the year Liebling died, and the Women’s House of Detention was demolished at last in 1974. Mitchell involved himself in many of these battles which were mostly won by ‘the god damn sons of ...”

“... started being driven to the Bois as well as back.’ (Similarly, his idea of dieting was drinking white wine rather than red at lunch.) On the major policy question, he took the debatable view that ‘monetary union is more likely to be the cause of economic convergence than the result of it,’ and pressed for this. But all the while he was still brooding on ...”

“... one wants to cry just thinking about him – playing tennis in newly-pressed flannels, snowy white sneakers and ‘spotless’ T-shirt, Costello is a sort of teenage Lohengrin – she reunites deserted wife with errant husband. Though Magda’s return to Smith shatters Costello – she leaves town without warning – we must assume it gives both her and ...”

“... and West and multicultural England is described by Jusserand as the ‘meeting of the waters’, Norman, Saxon and Dane coming together so that ‘England is now “merrie England”, bursting with life and vigour’. In Italy, according to the Fortnightly Review in 1902, the waters were meeting but failing to mingle, as if at the confluence of the Rhone and ...”

“... in the Palestinian case, a homeland for the resolution of its exile since 1948. But, as Hayden White has noted in a seminal article, ‘narrative in general, from the folk tale to the novel, from annals to the fully realised “history”, has to do with the topics of law, legality, legitimacy, or, more generally, authority.’1 Now there are numerous UN ...”

“... the ‘pornography of despair’, art-internationalism, on Serota and Saatchi and Norman Rosenthal and the Turner Prize, on new hyped foreign painting (Schnabel and the Italian Transavantgardia), on the so-called ‘Neo-Geo’ movement from New York (being collected by Saatchi), on the British ‘new object’ sculptors (also collected by ...”

“... side, there are limits to local supply – the efforts of Conor Cruise O’Brien, Paul Johnson or Norman Stone, however infallible, will only go so far; while on the other, the lights of the New Criterion or Public Interest shine brighter in the reputable British mirror than they do more nakedly at home. The result is a formula that makes for a livelier ...”

“... memoir into an exquisitely private, vulnerable space, moving it away from the public territory of Norman Mailer’s 1968 The Armies of the Night: History as a Novel/The Novel as History. The voice is distant but not disembodied. It is strung-out, staccato, impatient. There is no time here for soft memory, easy noticing or obvious emotion. Feeling is buried in ...”