“... memoirs, and almost completely messed it up. At one stage an experienced literary agent, George Greenfield, was brought in to advise, but found himself ‘constantly interrupted by Mrs Thatcher . . . who fixed him with a blank, self-absorbed stare. “The extent of her ill-conceived ignorance at that time was only matched by the brazen vigour with ...”

“... troops to fight side by side might undermine settler colonial segregation, but relented after King George V intervened.) As Allied losses mounted, the colonial contribution came to seem increasingly important: Major Darnley Stuart-Stephens called for a ‘Million Black Army’. Churchill lent his support, fearing a verdict from ‘historians of the ...”

“... was the year in which the judicial committee of the Privy Council overturned a judgment against George Denison, archdeacon of Taunton, who had been deprived of his living for publishing sermons that seemed, by endorsing belief in the Real Presence of Christ in the sacraments, to contravene two of the 39 Articles of the Church of England. Today it is an ...”

“... I, is a case in point – but the other big piece he presented to the king, Landscape with St George and the Dragon, lifts off into poetry. The fact that the scene is unmistakeably the Thames Valley does a lot of the work, for any history-aware viewer who registers also the dragon-vanquishing knight-cum-king, the fair English rose he’s redeeming, and ...”

“... search for a solution to the problems of capitalism. The socio-economic reforms enacted by Lloyd George and the ‘New Liberal’ government of 1906-14 were influenced by Seebohm Rowntree’s concept of a poverty line as well as an imperialist drive for national efficiency. But for Tawney and his successors, these solutions were grounded in ...”

“... by asking them how they spent the leisure time that the magazines of the 1890s loved to celebrate. George Bernard Shaw listed his recreations as ‘cycling and showing off’.Today’s Who’s Who remains a child of the 1890s. The editorial board stands by the book’s original intention, to recognise people whose ‘prominence is inherited, or depending upon ...”

“... parse and digest. Coetzee won his Booker Prizes for portrayals of South Africa (Life and Times of Michael K and Disgrace). Everett gained recognition for a novel about an African American novelist, Erasure (2001), and was included on this year’s Booker shortlist for The Trees, a counterfactual comedy set in 2018, in which Emmett Till returns to Mississippi ...”

“... Savage, John Travolta), though some were filmed and then dropped (Bill Pullman, Mickey Rourke). George Clooney was cast, scripted, shot and widely promoted, but he was on screen for just 83 seconds. In an army of a million stories we are not expected to take any particular individual seriously. Nothing justifies or explains the war; it is the spasm of a ...”

“... inner work. The Compound of Alchemy, written in the 15th century by a canon of Bridlington called George Ripley, describes the twelve ‘gates’ of purification through which the stone must pass if it is to be successfully manufactured, or – reading between the lines – through which the soul must pass to be successfully redeemed. Metaphors of ...”

“... The Closing of the American Mind (1987). Another pupil, Paul Wolfowitz, played a central role in George W. Bush’s invasion of Iraq as Donald Rumsfeld’s deputy at the Pentagon. And the ‘Claremonsters’, as they are sometimes known, are prominent in the MAGA movement – which is not, contrary to received opinion, entirely populated by anti-intellectual ...”

“... their eyes back on the pre-reform era, saw little reason to dispute its unsavoury reputation. Even Michael MacDonald, whose splen did Mystical Bedlam used the casebooks of the astrological physician and divine Richard Napier to illuminate the mental world of the 17th century, and to suggest that mental alienation and distress might then have been dealt with in ...”

“... works blowing over from Newington Butts. She was 77 years old, a relic of the days of mad King George. She had outlived both her husband and her son. It was her daughter-in-law Caroline, now married to a clerk named Eastwood, who was with her when she died. There were no obituaries. It was a small event in a small corner of the metropolis; a drop in the ...”

“... 1968 cast its vote like this: Winthrop Rockefeller for governor, William Fulbright for senator and George Wallace for President. It has correctly been described as one of the richest little poor states in the union. Today’s Little Rock has a skyline of modern corporatism, housing numerous local monopolies such as Tyson Foods, the Worthen Bank, the Stephens ...”

“... the ratification of the Kyoto Protocol, made the ecoterrorist a pop cultural staple. The nadir was Michael Crichton’s novel State of Fear (2004), in which a group of eco-extremists fake climate disasters for political ends. Crichton appended various denialist tracts to the text, though its paranoid reading of climate politics was a few years ahead of the ...”

“... period, the 1967 edition Podhoretz is ‘in with the in-crowd’ (Jackie Kennedy, Lillian Hellman, George Plimpton); he goes where the in-crowd goes, knows what the in-crowd knows. Podhoretz was even invited to Truman Capote’s Black and White Ball of 1966, the party of the century. There could have been no greater confirmation of his having ‘arrived’. In ...”