“... bloody crossroads’ where they have so often met, can disown a debt to the Cruiser. I hope that this is enough by way of sorrow and sincerity, though I could certainly have amplified it. Because the plain fact is that his latest book is a disgrace. Even if it doesn’t make one angry, it is a cause for disgust and depression. It fouls his ...”

“... else about – and the most frequent subject of these psychological inventions is Chief Justice Warren Burger, who, the authors admit, refused to talk to them at all. Assassination by non-attribution is sordid, and the most unattractive aspect of this book is the campaign it conducts against Chief Justice Burger. Every few pages offers some unsubstantiated ...”

“... latter. This point is made not just in the text but via the illustrations. An Indian miniature of Warren Hastings, Governor of Bengal, is reproduced so as to stress that while the British began seriously to rule Indians in the late 18th century, they did so partly by mimicking existing Indian élites. A Nigerian souvenir of George V’s jubilee superimposes ...”

“... this visit Asbury spends several days working with the black farmhands Morgan and Randall, in the hope of establishing a rapport with some representatives of the race whom he aims to dignify. First he persuades them to smoke with him in the cow barn, though this is against his mother’s orders. The next day, two cans of milk are returned because they taste ...”

“... from power. If laws are their enemies, they will be enemies to laws; and those who have much to hope and nothing to lose will always be dangerous, more or less.’ For the young Burke, it was a relief to escape poverty and oppression for the more congenial pleasures of London. He trained for the Bar, but despite this outward show of obedience had little ...”

“... or dismissed as merely imaginary. The sincere man, the honest consciousness, had a reasonable hope of grasping it at last. But now Trilling finds himself confronted with a literature and a culture in which sincerity and the honest consciousness are only impotent survivals; and he comes to terms with that state of affairs in his last and finest ...”

“... Yet he will have had the instructive privilege of entering Rabbi Shorr’s labyrinthine warren of a town house, peopled by the most obscure members of a far-flung clan reassembling from distant parts to celebrate a momentous wedding. Does Father Chmielowski’s path ever cross Jacob’s? I cannot remember; but at least during that same visit he ...”

“... Society, 1999) depended in part on complex post-imperial investigations that few of us can hope to emulate, but also on his personal engagement with the work he was doing. Recent academic thinking has used Foucault’s catch-all about the ‘little toolbox’ that his works are supposed to provide as an anti-humanist argument for critical ...”

“... but they made each other laugh. Both joined the Hypocrites club (‘a noisy, alcohol-soaked rat-warren’) where Cockburn fell in love with whisky (‘I got up fairly early … I would then drink a large sherry glass of neat whisky before breakfast and … drink heavily throughout the day’). Astonishingly, his drinking and his later consumption of several ...”

“... the main Japanese stock exchange. Leeson had been doubling and redoubling his bets in the belief/hope that the index would rise, and hiding the resulting open position – a gigantic open-ended bet – in a secret account. (Incidentally, Leeson’s big bet was on the Nikkei holding its level above 18,000. At the time of writing, 12½ years later, the index ...”

“... of his local congregation, and encouraging an unbreakably strong bond with his older brother, Warren (‘Warnie’). He mostly hated his schooldays in England, but flourished under the supervision of an eccentric private coach, sufficiently so to gain a place at Oxford. For a healthy British male, November 1916 was not the best moment to have one’s 18th ...”

“... a sufficiently lucrative spike in advertising. It’s like jumping out of an airplane in the hope that you will land in a big enough pile of hay. But guess what? It worked. The Standard’s circulation is now at 700,000 copies, and it is – as you can tell just by looking at it from a distance – fuller of ads than ever. It seems bizarre to me that ...”

“... felt at the treatment meted out by the medical profession to the young shell-shock victim Septimus Warren Smith, Clarissa’s dark double: insanity to her sanity, death to her life. In the novel, the cold fury climaxes in a lengthy denunciation of the will-to-power manifest in the Harley Street specialist Sir William Bradshaw’s worship of the twin ...”

“... and after the transition. The same practical humanity is there in his great campaign against Warren Hastings and the East India Company, which is to come in Bromwich’s second volume. One final campaign is worth listing here to complete the record. It was a small affair at the time, but Burke’s words resonate to us in this post-Holocaust age with a ...”

“... went to slosh, became friends with Jacqueline Kennedy, and had flings with Robert Kennedy Jr, Warren Beatty (who would keep her waiting forty tedious minutes while he primped for their date, probably trying to shine the twinkle in his eye) and the presidential speechwriter Richard Goodwin, who, deploying tricks of the trade learned from a French ...”