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“... leaders in this period emerge as who they were rather than as what they did. The main exception is Margaret Thatcher, who gets a page about her character and background – much more than De Gaulle, Willy Brandt or Khrushchev. This is curious for several reasons. First of all, because Judt does not like Thatcher, giving further space to describing the moral ...”

“... Stewart and John Wayne, but I think that elevates him too much: his mentality is clouded with lesser subtleties, occluded with hungers of a more brutal, mercenary, low-budget kind. He has the effective salesman’s knowledge of how to play with people’s sense of what is good about themselves, and he brings on tears in his pitch for the superiority of ...”

“... most thoroughly known by most people in this country – the Bible should be included among its lesser rivals. The English and the Welsh were active participants in the Prayer Book, as they made their liturgical replies to the person leading worship in the thousands of churches throughout the realm: they were actors week by week in a drama whose cast ...”

“... down the Italian peninsula as insurrections broke out in Milan, Venice, Turin, Florence and many lesser cities. This stirring background music exposed the danger latent in the pope’s relationship with the crowd. Did he really have a choice whether or not to bestow his blessing when thirty thousand citizens gathered in front of his palace at two in the ...”

“... interests of Humphrey Bogart, Barbara Stanwyck, Peter Lorre, Mary Astor, Joseph Cotten and many lesser lights in the studio firmament. Those of us who knew Clancy – he died in July 2017 in Los Angeles at the age of ninety – can attest that he was a tummler of note, a real-life Zelig who found himself with astonishing frequency at the ringside of ...”

“... death. I first met him in 1968 when Patrick Garland brought him backstage with Princess Margaret after Forty Years On. A friend of Patrick’s, he talked mostly to him, but Princess Margaret didn’t confine herself to John Gielgud and Paul Eddington but to her credit wanted to meet the boys in the play, which she ...”

“... to live on pain and bitterness. When he could, he hid his misery behind better things, covered the lesser with the pleasure that he took in small acts of recovery. These ‘small acts’ include his creative accounts of racial aggression towards him. That of ‘some high-spirited vagabonds chasing me through half-deserted streets’ carries a rueful updating ...”

“... eels of Archestratus and the oyster sausages of Apicius, Catherine de Medici’s pastry cooks and Margaret of York’s stuffed whale: all are the imperfect precursors of the Parisian cuisine of the 19th and 20th centuries. There is a grande cuisine internationale according to Revel, and it is French: not because French cooking has invaded the world, but ...”

“... of populism.’ Or: ‘Governments that try to pass the buck for failure can only succeed if like Margaret Thatcher’s Administrations they are able to blame others, often those most reliant on state support, for their weaknesses.’ The Bill is currently going through the House of Lords. It can only be hoped that the Lords’ opposition to it, together with ...”

“... watershed was the Pinochet case. The fact that the former dictator, Cold War ally and friend of Margaret Thatcher, could be arrested on the instructions of a Spanish magistrate elicited guffaws of delighted disbelief from at least three generations of human rights activists. The principle of global jurisdiction covering outrageous human rights abuses, and ...”

“... threat, had to ask an aide: ‘Can you please tell me, what can two women possibly do?’ Senator Margaret Chase Smith asked one Hoey Committee witness whether there wasn’t a ‘quick test like an X-ray that discloses these things’. The official justification for the purge was that homosexuals were vulnerable to blackmail and could be turned into Soviet ...”

“... bedevilled me for years. Take just one example: the unwritten story called ‘The Assassination of Margaret Thatcher’. I had seen it all, years ago: the date and place, the gunman, the bedroom behind him, the window, the light, the angle of the shot. But my problem had always been, how did the ArmaLite get in the wardrobe? Now I saw that it just grew ...”

“... tormented by his mother. Writers working on The Sopranos became celebrities to writers on lesser shows. The drivers and mechanics passed round copies of the scripts to read on set. Halfway through the series it was being watched by 11 million people a week. They’re still watching now. It only takes one of a multitude of elements to go wrong to spoil ...”

“... Geoffrey Heald, the priest who introduced Olivier to acting at the choir school of All Saints Margaret Street, and played Petruchio to his 13-year-old Katharina in The Shrew, told him to read Dickens – as an actor, he would never want for characterisations. The early chapters of Olivier’s Confessions are written in Dickensian pastiche, even borrowing ...”

“... which somehow continue to animate US politics, were his birthright. Once the field was cleared of lesser lights like Bush, Chris Christie, John Kasich and Carly Fiorina, he would bring about a future of Republican national majorities by bringing swelling numbers of Hispanics into the tent. The dominance of this narrative was enough to make you feel sympathy ...”