“... economic and ideological power. To these he adds others on Afghanistan, international terrorism, North Korea and Iraq. This is a wide-ranging work, in other words, and it repays close study, even by readers who will not find its perspective altogether congenial or convincing. It was America’s reckless foreign policy after 11 September, Mann explains, that ...”

“... by enlisting in a Global War on Terror. The terrorists, like the indigenous inhabitants of North America, would be defeated by American hunter heroes, fictional and historical: figures like Daniel Boone, Natty Bumppo and Davy Crockett – white men who replaced female captives as protagonists in the developing frontier mythology. In hunter hero ...”

“... have seen it in my first vacation from Oxford in January 1955 and in memory had put it somewhere north of Oxford Street, Portman Square possibly. In fact it was in Forbes House in Belgrave Square: not knowing London I took Knightsbridge to be Oxford Street. Of the exhibition I recall only the two huge blackamoors at the foot of the staircase in the entrance ...”

“... contain nearly a hundred thousand pages of manuscript material. The vast Collected Poems edited by Paul Keegan and published in 2003 presents a poet who insistently ‘o’erflows the measure’, to borrow a phrase from Antony and Cleopatra, veering, rather like Shakespeare’s Antony, between the sublime and the bathetic, the uncannily sure-footed and the ...”

“... for a university discussion to a church door in Wittenberg, a muddy three-street town on the north German plain. The pinball machine of history then sent the consequences flying round the continent, and we are still observing the ricochets. Within fifty years of this apparently trivial action (Luther’s seminar never took place), people were calling the ...”

“... but hierarchical domination’. In Ecology of Freedom he drew on work by the anthropologists Paul Radin and Marshall Sahlins, who argued that hunter-gatherer societies had been far more prosperous than previously thought and were humankind’s original ‘affluent societies’. Bookchin claimed hierarchy hadn’t existed in these ...”

“... party’s 2019 slogan, ‘Get Brexit Done’; the former Vote Leave director of communications, Paul Stephenson; and Ben Guerin, one half of Topham Guerin, the political consultancy firm that rebranded the Conservatives’ official Twitter account as a fact-checking service during a pre-election debate.*Johnson, the group agreed, needed a simple message ...”

“... Lesson of the Master’, Henry St George, the older novelist, offers the young writer Paul Overt a demonstration in self-sufficiency. He tells him a writer would do better not to marry, to put his passion into his work. Then marries the girl they both admire. That doesn’t stop Paul Overt offering an encomium ...”

“... Soul: stomping, emotional, rare Sixties American soul cuts that soundtracked a club scene in the North of England in the early Seventies. In Last Night a DJ Saved My Life Bill Brewster and Frank Broughton put Northern Soul in a historical context, not just as the ‘first rave culture’ but also ‘a vitally important step in the creation of today’s club ...”

“... the Circus at Bath, with its giant acorns, built between 1754 and 1768 to an esoteric design. John North noted in Stonehenge that the layout of the site is much more likely oriented not towards midsummer sunrise but midwinter sunset, which one might well think a time of fear and propitiation for Neolithic farmers rather than the joyous life celebration of ...”

“... of conscience over papal power prefigured the Vatican Council’s work so strikingly that Pope Paul VI could speak of it as ‘Newman’s Council’. Like many bodies of writing, Newman’s work was lent its most vital significance by events which lay in its future. Newman was aware that he was regarded in some circles as a saint, but thought he was quite ...”

“... to the top floor via express elevator, himself becomes in effect the message, that evil capitalist Paul Newman can see his way to the ingenious stock scam which drives the plot on towards last-minute angelic intervention. The arrangement by phalanx required by lift protocol has the great virtue of precluding conversation. Cinema’s best elevator scenes ...”

“... life, playing polo, attending cocktail parties and spending weekends on the beaches of the north coast. The other ranks took their pleasures where they could find them. For the regular soldiers this usually meant the brothels of Kingston. On return to camp they were required to attend the grandly named Prophylactic Ablution Centre. Those who failed to ...”

“... pursued ideas of material progress, or ‘improvement’. In The Invention of Improvement (2015), Paul Slack interestingly showed how a word that originally referred to profitable agrarian innovation took on a more general meaning as a progressive slogan for beneficial change of any kind. ‘Improvement’ was the application of reason and ingenuity to the ...”

“... British control of Palestine, had made him unpopular in Britain). My family milieu was very much North London professional-academic, and what was then called progressive. We were all admirers of Israel, as were the newspapers and magazines we read, the Guardian and the New Statesman. In the early 1960s, when I read Hecht’s memoir, the only support for ...”