“... foreign policy’. The bipartisan support for the president’s bombing campaigns shows that little has changed in this respect, however. As Trump ordered strikes on Syria in April last year, Fareed Zakaria hailed the ‘big moment’: ‘Donald Trump,’ he said, ‘became president of the United States last night.’ As Trump dispatched his ‘shiny ...”

“... yet still seemed nearer the mark.) There was no pleasing either side in that divided decade: Arthur Scargill was as hostile to the BBC as Thatcher, denouncing the TV news as ‘pure unadulterated bias’. And so it goes on, with complaints and threats stacking up like Brexit-blocked containers.At the outset, the BBC’s fragile autonomy owed as much to ...”

“... will know that this man used to exist.’ The pseudo-sophisticated belief that the Chinese care little about individual or human rights, however difficult these may be to realise in a Chinese context, should not survive a reading of these pages. ‘In my first year at university I felt I was surrounded by people in chains. But occasionally I would read ...”

“... are not as easily laughed off. Anyone who has read Eating people is wrong and who knew the late Arthur Humphries (professor of English at Leicester, where Bradbury got his first degree) must suspect that the novel’s hero, Stuart Treece, is a portrait from life. Nor could one believe that the portrait (although it is not at all malicious) furnished its ...”

“... and blame its continuing presence more on multicultural ‘balkanisation’ (the term belongs to Arthur Schlesinger Jr) than on the white resentment which they, in some measure, share. Or in time-honoured minstrel tradition, new Democrats black up political programmes with African American cultural identification: programmes directed against the inner ...”

“... or divined concealed rules. It was the decade, too, of what one might call ludic taxonomy. From Arthur Koestler’s 1942 essay we learnt to divide our friends into yogis and commissars; from Isaiah Berlin’s 1953 book to characterise the world’s thinkers as hedgehogs or foxes; from Nancy Mitford two years later to distinguish between U and non-U. From ...”

“... of their attention. She gives us the domestic detail; records of the Artois courts give us a little more. Like many educated young men of the time, Robespierre cultivated his sensibilities. He wrote a little light verse. He was sociable, up to a point. He had women friends. He could easily have married. Except for his ...”

“... appearance, has largely reverted in old age to a state of Blakean innocence and moral simplicity. (Little Lamb – you rackety old thing – who did make thee? I have some questions I’d like to ask Him.) True: ravages of macular degeneration notwithstanding, she still spends an hour every morning ‘putting her face on’, with predictably fantastical, Isak ...”

“... my subjects and has enough money to put us above anxiety and not too much money. Her means are a little more than my earnings and will increase later, but our two incomes together will keep us in comfort.’ They were married in October 1917. He was 52; his new wife, soon to call herself George, was 25. Ezra Pound, best man at the wedding, wrote to John ...”

“... the roadside. Tezze is a small town, much prized and fought over for hundreds of years, but with little to impress tourists despite being the site of a Commonwealth War Graves Commission cemetery. At the end of a path lined with cypress trees a rectangle of clipped lawn is enclosed by low grey stone walls. Some 356 British soldiers and airmen of the First ...”

“... told it looked as if he was developing ‘full-blown Aids’. It was early 1985. They were given little information. For the first few months, they weren’t sure if Joe really did have Aids. He was 21 and Frankie was 19; they hadn’t been married long. Frankie, they discovered, was pregnant. Joe’s doctors offered them tests, but only vague ...”

“... by America’s natural advantages and by what he believed was the good sense of its people. He had little faith in its democratic institutions but great confidence in the unpretentious instincts of its solid citizens – ‘the silent majority’, as Nixon was to call them.Once Kissinger became Nixon’s national security adviser, and later secretary of ...”

“... the Epic of Gilgamesh – to Iraq and Egypt. Individual billionaire collectors in the tradition of Arthur Sackler, most of them based in New York (where by far the greatest share of wealth in the antiquities market is exchanged), continued to buy.Remarkably little has changed in the global political economy of antiquities ...”

“... better than any other singer; see also her meltingly sad rendition of ‘Have Yourself a Merry Little Christmas’ in Meet Me in St Louis, a song of consolation which leaves the consoler herself unconsoled. In ‘You Made Me Love You’, she sells the song with such an impression of sincerity and sweet touches of childish humour that you almost forget how ...”

“... answer, he proceeded to pour the wine over the back of my hand. Just a few years earlier, in 1969, Arthur Corbett, first husband of the famous male-to-female transsexual April Ashley, sought an annulment of their marriage on the grounds that at the time of the ceremony, Ashley was ‘a person of the male sex’. In the course of the proceedings, Corbett ...”