“... ambitions were as extraordinary as his military successes. Today, they would be: imagine Colin Powell taking time off from his Gulf War command for a brief seminar on the early work of Allen Ginsberg, or officers in Nato’s Balkan forces engaging in a philosophical correspondence with Slavoj Žižek. But Napoleon was not the only French officer of his day ...”

“... and none of them would have understood the modern relocation of politics below imagination. David Norbrook’s Poetry and Politics in Renaissance England is a protest against the devaluation of political verse, and especially of radical political verse. Where Dr Johnson could deplore Milton’s radicalism yet admire his poetry, Eliot and Leavis expelled ...”

“... how carefully Lawrence refuses to recognise virtue in anyone but himself’), and his sponsor David Pryce-Jones now finds F.R. Leavis much the same, so it may be legitimate to cite the famous excoriation of Bloomsbury that was voiced by Lawrence and amplified by Leavis: ‘they talked endlessly, but endlessly – and never, never a good thing said. They ...”

“... If this is the case when the ‘facts’ are right, how much more so when they are wrong? Hugh David’s book about Stephen Spender misleads in every way, factually as well as aesthetically, although in the general welter of disinformation it is barely possible to distinguish fact from treatment. As David’s previous ...”

“... Silvers, and his incompetent ventriloquist act clearly pays a kind of wooden lip-service to Sandy Powell. The pair’s celebrated three-cornered routines with their guests borrowed much from the triangular dialogues of Jimmy James and his two stooges, the beautifully and bizarrely named Bretton Woods and Hutton Conyers. Some of their more absurd moments show ...”

“... In Britain​, the man who closed the asylums was Enoch Powell. ‘There they stand,’ he announced to two thousand delegates at the 1961 annual conference of the National Association for Mental Health (now known as Mind), ‘isolated, majestic, imperious … the asylums which our forefathers built with such immense solidity to express the notions of their day ...”

“... Norman Podhoretz). Queenie Leavis of course became an official widow, and it is les veuves on whom David Laskin relies most heavily in this relatively orderly account of sexual and matrimonial chaos. Diana Trilling outlived Lionel by many a book; Mary McCarthy enjoyed the same revenge on Edmund Wilson; the witches of Eastwick (lacking only their Hardwick) have ...”

“... his sights.’ It seems unhelpful and ahistorical to compare FE with President Kennedy or Enoch Powell. Some of the material is repetitive. And it is odd that Campbell should speak of Birkenhead’s ‘sober dignity’ as Lord Chancellor, and ‘sober judgments’ in Baldwin’s Cabinets, when he was already hitting the bottle extensively. At the end of ...”

“... is also a very old country. It was founded in 1066 – by the French.’ Colin Powell had to concede that ‘America is a relatively new country,’ before going on to remind his audience that ‘it is the oldest democracy around this table.’ Here, then, is a society in which being over two hundred years old makes you young. But calling ...”

“... the hobnailed boot can be wielded with just as much delicacy and skill as the épée, once said of David Owen that the Good Fairy who attended his birth had generously bestowed upon him the three qualities of charm, intelligence and good looks. He is then reported to have added: ‘What a pity that the Bad Fairy made him a shit.’ This is a pretty cruel thing ...”

“... Macmillan for being soft on Russia: the only politician he has praised is his old favourite, Powell.) The column has a repertory company of fantasy figures – most of them mean, stupid and well-to-do – and when he solemnly reports their fatuous statements ‘Peter Simple’ sometimes sounds as if he were parodying his ...”

“... apocalyptic Westernists long to turn things around, to make their shattered world whole again. David Goodhart, the founding editor of Prospect, told the New York Times just before the general election that he believed Theresa May could dominate British politics for a generation. Mark Lilla, a professor at Columbia and a regular contributor to the New York ...”

“... is Saddam worth? And the answer is: not that damned many.’ In February 2001, I heard Colin Powell say that Saddam Hussein ‘has not developed any significant capability with respect to weapons of mass destruction. He is unable to project conventional power against his neighbours.’ That same month, I heard that a CIA report stated: ‘We do not have ...”

“... After the attacks of 11 September 2001, Cheney assembled a crack team of White House lawyers, David Addington, Timothy Flanigan and Alberto Gonzales, with support from John Yoo at the Justice Department, who set about granting the president as many extraordinary powers as Cheney thought he needed. First up was intercepting, without a ...”

“... of many. A couple of years ago a famous Israeli dove, and a philosopher, compared him to Enoch Powell because he criticised Israeli immigration policy for favouring easy access to Israel for Jews but not for others. But he did so, not to excitable Arab crowds on the West Bank but in the comparatively uncongenial atmosphere of New York’s Upper West ...”