“... was happening. The distortion, he said, reminded him of the 1964 Gulf of Tonkin incident, when the Johnson administration reversed the sequence of National Security Agency intercepts to justify one of the early bombings of North Vietnam. The same official said there was immense frustration inside the military and intelligence bureaucracy: ‘The guys are ...”

“... consultants they plan to remake Afghanistan in much the way their forebears in the Kennedy and Johnson administrations sought to forge a new Vietnam alongside the backroom boys from the Rand Corporation. As in Vietnam, indigenous resistance to the American project is hindering its realisation. Security is an obsession, the precondition for achieving the ...”

“... controls, withdrawal from the EEC and import controls. Much of this wasn’t new. The historian David Edgerton has described the AES as a ‘modernising, techno-nationalist, productionist, autarchic programme’ that was basically complementary to Harold Wilson’s ‘White Heat’ agenda. It was, however, profoundly out of step with the European Community ...”

“... Ciceronian’, with each main verb cunningly held back to the end of the sentence. According to Johnson, he was a remarkable instance of ‘how far impudence may carry ignorance’. Taylor himself – my John Taylor – later became oculist to George III, a job he shared with his brother. The post was unpaid and undemanding: though Taylor seems to have been ...”

“... translation. See Nations slowly wise, and meanly just, To buried Merit raise the tardy Bust, Dr Johnson remarked, but it isn’t the Danes who are raising this ‘tardy Bust’ to their own most famous son. They continue to affect the humorous indifference and condescending contempt which for more than a hundred years have been blinding them to the truth ...”

“... Ghanaians, Communist Party etc.’ There wasn’t much truth in these claims. ‘At its height,’ David Gibbs writes in The Political Economy of Third World Intervention (1991), ‘the communist intervention in the Congo comprised no more than 380 Soviets and Czechoslovaks – against 14,000 UN troops and many thousands of Belgian military ...”

“... peace. Turkey’s threats to invade Cyprus were quashed by a brusque missive from President Johnson. American schemes for ‘double enosis’, dividing the island into portions to be allocated to Greece and Turkey, got nowhere. In late 1965, the UN General Assembly formally called on all states to ‘respect the sovereignty, unity, independence and ...”

“... hero of Balzac and Stendhal, the figure in Henry James confronting her destiny, Madame Bovary or David Copperfield or even Moby Dick now became the unread or the unwritten book or the newly discovered passage, or the section where the author has lost control, or given up. In Pessoa’s The Book of Disquiet our hero muses: ‘Why should I care that no one ...”

“... say that even if the climate is changing, it isn’t our fault. ‘We human beings,’ Boris Johnson wrote in the Telegraph in January, ‘have become so blind with conceit and self-love that we genuinely believe that the fate of the planet is in our hands.’ On the one hand, then, the modest mayor of London. On the other, a former head of the US ...”

“... that they could not be Borked. Stealth has its own dangers. Bush thought he had a neo-con in David Souter, but he had been misinformed. He did a better job the next time. Clarence Thomas had arrived in Washington at the age of 31, and never left the Beltway thereafter, so his neo-con development could be carefully monitored. At 43, he had put in loyal ...”

“... miscue in his dealings with Bellow to account for the bungling of what could have been a beautiful Johnson-Boswell partnership. The book is a goody bag of quotable incidents and a useful guide to the biographer’s tradecraft, but pertinent to our immediate interest is the section where Atlas gives a draft of the work in progress to the social scientist Edward ...”

“... Lexit autarky would have swept the country to those who believed the country which elected Boris Johnson had secretly longed for a champion of faceless technocracy. All this was as much about self-exculpation as it was a means of striking at familiar targets – Blairites, Trots, Stalinists. There is no doubt that Corbyn’s standing was damaged in some ...”

“... on the nuclear codes?‘J.D. Vance! J.D. Vance!’ the forum chanted.I’ll take that as a yes.Ron Johnson, the Wisconsin senator, complained about ‘biological males competing against girls’. I suspect he will never know how sinister he sounds speaking about ‘girls’, but his transphobic contortions were entertainingly undercut by the public address ...”

“... a champion of privatisation, attributes the dropping of the ‘re-’ to a fellow Conservative, David Howell, one of the back-room Tory ideas men tinkering obscurely with economic models while Edward Heath and Harold Wilson squared off against the unions in the 1960s and 1970s. (Howell was Thatcher’s first energy minister. He is now Baron Howell of ...”

“... the way banking has changed, become more intense, more time-consuming and more overtly greedy. David Kynaston, author of a magisterial four-volume history of the City, completed in 2001, observes at the start of the fourth volume that ‘the modern City is in many ways a cruel, heartless place, and its occupants work such cripplingly long hours that ...”