“... rates, which was always one of her prime goals (she told Major that lower interest rates were the price she would extract for ERM membership). But Ridley was gesturing towards the fundamental problem as Thatcher saw it. A Europe supplied with the benefits of German economic management would necessarily be a Europe in which the Germans had too much power. If ...”

“... the same rule of agreement; as Baron says, ‘violating a little grammatical rule was no great price to pay in order to keep the masculine pronoun at the top of the gender hierarchy.’) Second, the generic ‘he’ is a tool of patriarchy. While an indefinite like ‘everyone’ includes people of any gender, even when accompanied by the undeniably ...”

“... that built-in shrug characteristic of Eighties Conservatism, electrodes on the testicles a small price to pay when economic recovery’s at stake. They both talk contemptuously of gesture politics as if Lady Thatcher having tea with the General isn’t gesture politics too, the gesture in question being two fingers to humanity. 1 November. Lord Tebbit writes ...”

“... In May 2016, Diana Craig Patch, the Met’s curator for Egyptian art, received an email from Richard Semper, a Paris-based dealer, pitching a ‘hard piece I have for sale’. It was Nedjemankh’s coffin: Semper and his partner, Christophe Kunicki, wanted €4.5 million. Kunicki is a fixture in the European art world, fêted by museum curators. He ...”

“... I hate to say it, but it can be very helpful to us. I mean you hear a singer even as brilliant as Richard Tucker and he’s a Jew. HALDEMAN: Is he? NIXON: He’s pushy … HALDEMAN: There are a lot more anti-Semites than there are Jews, and the anti-Semites are with us generally and the Jews sure aren’t. The Breast was a grotesque fable out of Kafka ...”

“... back anti-lynching legislation, claiming it was a matter for the individual states. This was the price he paid for getting them to do his bidding when he needed them. But it made him repugnant to the liberal wing of the party. To them, he reeked of ‘magnolia’. Nonetheless, Johnson believed a brokered convention that could not coalesce around a liberal ...”

“... offered to buy Benjafield’s shares in the newspaper; Benjafield named an absurdly inflated price; the prince paid up. Overnight the Morning Post became an opposition newspaper, and Taylor was promoted from drama critic to editor, though with the politician and dramatist Richard Brinsley Sheridan managing the ...”

“... to spring a trap in our minds. ‘Rural England is where urban England now dumps its rubbish,’ Richard Girling writes. ‘Here it tips everything from garbage in landfills to fridges in ponds, broken cars and surplus people.’1 The Daily Mail says there is a plague of rats in Britain as a result of the lack of care taken in refuse collection. The ...”

“... by Thomas Gainsborough, Joshua Reynolds, Arthur Devis, John Opie, Jonathan Richardson and Richard Cosway, among others. The small, unattributed canvas he disposes of in 1928 is not in the same league. But it does come with an intriguing back story. Most of Henry Howard’s family’s wealth originally came from sugar plantations worked by enslaved ...”

“... see, if only we had looked. Two who drew the inevitable conclusions were the incoming President, Richard Nixon, elected on a promise of ‘peace with honour’ reminiscent of Mendès-France, and his devious National Security Adviser, Henry Kissinger. Both had impeccable anti-Communist credentials, both had travelled widely (Nixon as Pepsi-Cola’s ...”

“... and wanted to be with her because he hoped that some of it might rub off on him.He paid a heavy price for marrying her: it entailed going into her father’s business. And so he became a fishmonger, getting up at five in the morning to go to Billingsgate Market and working till about four handling smelly, slithery goods and customers who haggled over prices ...”

“... football pitches, changing rooms erected to replace shower blocks opened in the dark ages by Wendy Richard of EastEnders. Back in the 1820s Gas Company funds were misappropriated, illegal payments made to council officials and stock accounts falsified. Now, in more enlightened times, when bureaucratic malpractice is exposed and celebrated every ...”

“... affair. Nor, given the army’s final and total climbdown, does anything show quite so clearly the price it had to pay for its own machinations, cover-up and self-deception. The army lied. And once its prestige and standing had been compromised by the first lie – the wrongful accusation of Dreyfus – it became even more important for it to lie over and over ...”

“... was another name for ‘excellence’. In the campus emergency of 1968 he even publicly endorsed Richard Nixon. In general, however, Strauss eschewed official bromide or partisan pronouncement; that was the role not of the teacher but of the taught. The veiled pole star of Strauss’s journey through the past was Nietzsche, the one modern thinker who – he ...”

“... world of foreign disease. The real-life archetype, who appears in two bestselling books from 1994, Richard Preston’s The Hot Zone and Laurie Garrett’s The Coming Plague, is the medical researcher Joe McCormick. Here he is, in Garrett’s version, being asked by the WHO in 1979 to fly from the Atlanta headquarters of the US Centres for Disease Control and ...”