“... imperialism gets a free pass). Among the signatories were the tech billionaire Peter Thiel, Michael Anton, a Machiavelli scholar who worked on the communications staff for Trump’s National Security Council, and Charlie Kirk, a star of conservative talk radio and founder of the Trumpist student movement Turning Point. On the eve of NatCon ...”

“... exercise in concise exposition of complex and erudite arguments, followed by a devastatingly frank dismissal of all the central claims. Moreover, in writing of ‘Stone’s long-running battle with Geoffrey Elton, his only real rival in the Early Modern historians’ war of words’, Cannadine displays an unerring instinct for saying what will ...”

“... Blair says immediately to my wife: ‘Weren’t you kind enough to ask me to a drinks party for Frank Field’s 50th birthday?’ She answers: ‘Yes, and you neither came nor replied.’ ‘Didn’t I?’ says Blair, and subsequently sends a charming letter of apology. The thought that this smiling young Scottish public schoolboy could be the next prime ...”

“... My first encounter with Peter Medawar revealed something about us both. When he was the new Mason Professor of Zoology in the University of Birmingham I was a student at University College, Nottingham, and one of my tasks as president of the student Zoological Society was to give votes of thanks to visiting speakers ...”

“... about Orwell, including the memoir of Richard Rees and The Unknown Orwell by William Abrahams and Peter Stansky (lamed by the late Soni Orwell’s refusal of permission to quote), and, more recently, the expansive Life by Bernard Crick, at first authorised by the widow to emphasise her rejection of Stansky and Abrahams, and later de-authorised by her to ...”

“... kinds continues at an unflagging pace, often getting by without puns and politics. For example, Peter Thomson’s Shakespeare’s Professional Career is an exceptionally lively and up-to-the-minute introduction to ‘Shakespeare’s job’. It leans slightly towards the view that his family, and he himself residually, was Catholic, and argues with more ...”

“... of having their knees nailed to the furniture. The fallen state of Private Eye is illustrated by Peter McKay’s foolish and ill-written book, Inside Private Eye, but scornful young readers should remember that this downmarket old fogey was once a young fogey. It stood up to the Krays, a plucky little public-school rag-mag. This brings us back to The Old ...”

“... When the Germans occupied His Pasteur Institute With all those poor dogs Paulin has also praised Peter Reading for being ‘user-hostile’, and for contriving, by avoiding iambs, to demonstrate ‘his dissidence from the state’. The preface to Paulin’s excellent Faber Book of Vernacular Verse explains his preference for demotic diction and the natural ...”

“... Peck’s response was ambiguous: ‘We are again giving some thought to the possibility of a frank exchange of views with the Americans on the subject. As usual, however, it does not seem to be quite the right moment. We have other things we want to talk to them about.’ The only high-level exchanges between 25 August and 13 September concerned the ...”

“... was special. Mies van der Rohe was asked to design it after a committee had considered both Frank Lloyd Wright and Le Corbusier: Phyllis Lambert, an architect and the daughter of the head of Seagram, persuaded her father that the opportunity to give New York a great building should not be lost. The Four Seasons restaurant on the ground floor – a ...”

“... of refuge and fantasy’. It is one of those destinations – ‘like the South of France before Peter Mayle, and Tuscany before champagne socialists’ – which, it is assumed, is ‘unspoilt by the American coffee shops and the malls and the ring roads that have ruined Arnoldian England’. But as Sansom discovers, the Ireland of middle-class English ...”

“... of a common Russian sensibility such as Tolstoy had imagined in his dancing scene’. Since Peter the Great, however, this ‘common Russian sensibility’ always contained a European admixture, and Figes criticises those – Rilke, Thomas Mann, Virginia Woolf – who swallowed whole the myth of a completely indigenous ‘Russian soul’. All the great ...”

“... at least, responsive to drug treatment. The bacteriological paradigm found an ardent advocate in Frank Billings, president of the American Medical Association at the turn of the century, who declared war on sepsis, urging surgical intervention, from the teeth to the tonsils to the intestines, to ‘make sure that all sources of focal infection have been ...”

“... he only really sputtered to life again in 1990 with an autobiography, and died a few years later. Peter Orlovsky and Allen Ginsberg at the Hotel de Londres, Paris in 1957. Bob Thompson, ‘LeRoi Jones and his Family’ (1964) Brion Gysin, ‘Calligraphy’ (1960) Brion Gysin, William S. Burroughs, Untitled (Primrose Path, the Third Mind, p.12, 1965) Ettore ...”

“... Richard Rorty has made us familiar with the distinction between two sorts of philosophy, which he calls ‘systematic’ and (I think infelicitously) ‘edifying’. The first sticks to the central epistemological tradition, which assumes that it can deal systematically and progressively with reality; the second is essentially of the periphery, and its exponents are pragmatical opponents of the institutional tradition ...”