“... in Gerhardie. That was partly the trouble: he was, but he made his reputation as an exotic. Unlike Ronald Firbank, who had his own niche as a homosexual and a rare stylistic innovator, Gerhardie could not in the end claim to be anything specially, not even an eccentric. Although he had a close and life-long relationship with his mother Clara, his own tastes ...”

“... and pity the poor. Their recklessness is exciting – summed up in a memorable phase in Candleford Green about the thrill of walking ‘hatless to Hindhead’. The friendship has sombrely romantic elements – the sister is delicate, the father dead, the mother slightly mad – and its development is recounted as if doomed to some Mary Webb-like climax. When ...”

“... the last number of the London Review. Liberty (the NCCL) and polemicists such as Keith Ewing and Ronald Dworkin have confined their attention to a Bill of Rights alone. But the yoking of the two is not accidental. It reflects the cast of mind which two centuries ago in the US found it necessary to temper the creation of a federal state by enacting a ...”

“... with someone’s upchucked lunch and pots of gold paint. The room in which she received me was the green the Nile is supposed to be, but almost certainly isn’t. Not, alas, pink, though the dozen or so urns of flowers – two held spiritedly aloft by a pair of life-sized gilded satyrs – were symphonies of pink carnations, lilies and the like. But in common ...”

“... boundaries in nature, and this is one of the most astounding: from the west, you can hike up a green mountain slope and come to the divide, where you look over at the beginning of a thousand miles or more of desert, stand in patches of deep snow from the winter before and look at a terrain that receives only a few inches of moisture a year. In most of ...”

“... him. Three new books on Mann, however, each as long as Buddenbrooks, have appeared in English. Ronald Hayman and Donald Prater are Rosencrantz and Guildenstern to Anthony Heilbut’s Hamlet. They are dull and worthy and useful perhaps, and they repeat the same facts and the same narrative. Their desire for Mann to be a better person is almost ...”

“... Afew days​ after Ronald Reagan died in 2004, I was hurrying through Newark airport when I spied his smiling countenance on the cover of the Economist, accompanied by a caption in big block letters: THE MAN WHO BEAT COMMUNISM. This preposterous tribute succinctly summarised the conventional wisdom regarding the end of the Cold War ...”

“... have believed it,’ ‘Wait and see,’ remind one of the homely sentiments of Ronald Reagan. However, last October, in an extraordinary speech for a Chancellor to a Tory Conference, there was a glimpse of something more. Brushing aside his Treasury brief as swiftly as he decently could, he came out with an explicit statement, delivered ...”

“... her dictatorial style, not by the peasants who felt her fist in their faces. There are protests by Ronald Reagan, Enoch Powell and Adolf Hitler. There are two pieces about the Titanic, two about the Lusitania and two on the abdication of Edward VIII. Considering what MacArthur omits, repetitions are irritating. (There is also a repeated typo. You may wonder ...”

“... white colleagues) is free food and drink: all-you-can-eat salad; chocolate margarita shakes (at a Ronald McDonald product placement); spinach dumplings (the sort that leave ‘a green rot on the incisors that everyone is too polite and malevolent to remark upon’); ‘authentic’ army rations (at TNT’s launch of its new ...”

“... cards to customers: in one store the key was ‘red for no credit, black for $25, blue for $50, green for $100 and gold for $150 or more’. In the 1920s, Rand Visible Filing Systems were marketed with transparent celluloid tabs in various colours for this purpose. In another system, all the files started out white, but were permanently stained blue or red ...”

“... for a $10 million backhander to the Contras and then lost the money in a Swiss computer error. Ronald Reagan sent three envoys with a cake and a Bible to Tehran to discuss an arms-for-hostages trade with the Ayatollah Khomeini. Robert MacNamara went to a briefing on Cuba believing that it was more than likely that he would not live through the weekend. The ...”

“... just for factory floors but for engineering and computer posts’. Nor is he attracted by ‘the green card and holiday visa’ for the United States, to join other Irishmen, ‘illegal immigrants melting into the streets of American towns’. Hano and the girl, Kate or Cait, are trying to find a ‘home’ in rural Ireland, away from the lurid and ...”

“... academic, to be ‘undermined by anecdote’. ‘In the war against poverty, poverty won.’ said Ronald Reagan. American conservatives argued that government welfare programmes created a whole set of ‘perverse incentives’ which, directly or indirectly, actually made things worse. This thesis was popularised in the influential book Losing ground, by ...”

“... give us a taste of road-kill reality are glimpses on television of fluttering hearts framed in green operating-theatre linen, which go with good news about how we can be reamed, stitched and supplied with spare parts. The terror of the dark interior still lives, but we confront it now in images of war and disaster or in special effects at the ...”