“... returned together to America, and married in May 1929. By this time ‘Fuzzy’ was already seeing John Millet, psychiatrist, at the Austen Higgs Centre in Stockbridge. ‘Fuzzy’ was fatal. He was very handsome. He had genuine artistic talents. He insisted on the importance of extreme physical activity, but was himself fragile. He and Alice had eight ...”

“... of the inauguration of an academic programme in October 1895, in two rented rooms in what is now John Adam Street. Nor is it unprecedented for someone who has run the School to write about it. One can point to the austere history of the LSE’s foundation by Sir Sydney Caine, or to what Dahrendorf calls ‘William Beveridge’s intriguing London School of ...”

“... world’. Berenson’s recorded utterances sound all too self-consciously sagacious. ‘Young John Carter Brown, who one day was to become director of the National Gallery of Art’, came with a plan ‘to prepare for a museum career by first taking a business course’. Berenson urged him to ‘look, look, look, until you are blind with looking, and out ...”

“... inspiration. According to Lloyd George, ‘the map of Europe as we see it today is the map of Joseph Mazzini. He was the prophet of free nationality ... He taught us not merely the rights of a nation; he taught the rights of other nations ... He is the father of the idea of the League of Nations.’ Disillusionment with Versailles, and the revulsion ...”

“... of sexual codes in a largely secular society. But his evidence is, as usual, contradictory. Joseph Priestley was very hostile to any form of sex before marriage; James Mill had ‘a neurotic aversion to sex’; John Stuart Mill was ambivalent, but an early supporter of contraception; Bentham defended sexual pleasure ...”

“... her fault, poor dear. Twenty years earlier she might have been trading poisoned darts with John Barrymore. But she and her sorority sisters were condemned to representing a girdled, uplifted world whose only edges were in the bones and stitching of their foundation garments. Faced with so much overwhelmingly off-putting evidence, the feminists, and ...”

“... Life of Hu Yaobang and Chen Jian’s of Zhou Enlai, both published in 2024.* We can now add Joseph Torigian’s biography of Xi Zhongxun. Such biographies necessarily intervene in several irresolvable contests. Were these men principled revolutionaries or deviants from the true cause? Why were they always purging one another? Torigian’s intervention ...”

“... Highgate.’ He adapts the tone and texture of other ex-spooks who ‘went over’: Ian Fleming, John le Carré. He admits that his dialogue is invented, all his East End villains are squeezed into one composite character, Mickey Williams. MI6 became nervous of the Marks connection in the wake of the Littlejohn affair, two brothers they had sponsored, going ...”

“... home: Philby in Ambala, India, son of the eccentric explorer of Arabia (and Ford motor agent) St John Philby; Sorge in Baku, Russia to a German petroleum engineer and his Russian wife, the daughter of a prosperous capitalist from Kiev. Politically, Sorge’s lineage was even more exotic than Philby’s: while his father was a staunch subject of the ...”

“... to marry them. In Lichfield, the geographical centre of Middle England, a statue of Captain Edward John Smith of the Titanic stands in a park bestowing dangerous blessings on newly-wed couples emerging from the nearby register office. In McKie’s version of England the past is generally not allowed to assert itself as a moral yardstick, a measure of decline ...”

“... building, a 16th-century revision of the 13th-century church founded by the Knights of St John. The Hole is a statement and it is properly capitalised. The labourers, a self-confessed art collective, work the Hole by hand, with pick and shovel, turn and turn about: four days to complete a grave shaft, without any of the tortured grinding and ...”

“... life, the spectrum on which you, as an individual, are plotted from cradle to grave. As Pierre-Joseph Proudhon explained, you must be ‘noted, registered, enumerated, accounted for, stamped, measured, classified, audited, patented, licensed, authorised, endorsed, reprimanded, prevented, reformed, rectified and corrected, in every operation, every ...”

“... Like Harman, Graner was a keen amateur photojournalist. At one point he shows an MP colleague, Joseph Darby, a picture of an inmate, naked apart from a bag over his head, sitting in a puddle. Graner tells Darby: ‘The Christian in me knows it’s wrong, but the corrections officer in me can’t help but love to make a grown man piss himself.’ However ...”

“... more recently to find Isaiah Berlin lumping Burke in with ‘reactionary thinkers’ such as Joseph de Maistre. Berlin’s friend Stuart Hampshire is contemptuous not simply of Burke’s views but of the quality of his thought: Burke’s rhetoric was mere assertion. It was not proof or even argument. He was not clear and he was not consistent. He saw ...”

“... Reformed Protestantism is often called Calvinism, after the French Reformer John Calvin, but that is a mistake; the Reformed had many and varied leaders and thinkers of significance, and one of the things that annoyed the Reformed about Lutheranism was its idolisation of the single figure of Martin Luther. There was good reason for ...”