“... untrammelled by international institutions. Trumpeting Bush’s pre-emptive assault on Iraq, Michael Ignatieff recommended in 2003 a new American empire whose ‘grace notes are free markets, human rights and democracy, enforced by the most awesome military power the world has ever known’.The United States, Power asserted as Obama’s nominee for US ...”

“... novels have survived, thanks to the efforts of such admirers as J.B. Priestley, Doris Lessing and Michael Holroyd, and to the biographical enterprise set in train by his older brother, Bruce, whose memoir of Patrick, The Light Went Out (1972), prompted the first Hamilton mini-revival. Bruce was upfront about his brother’s drinking: his book is the source of ...”

“... party that our parents were insistent should not include the children from the terraced houses,’ Michael Burns wrote, recalling VE Day celebrations in Tolworth near Kingston. And it was much the same eight years later in New Malden at the Coronation festivities (‘They’re much too posh for street party’ was the headline in the People). If there is a ...”

“... with whom they shared an interest in theory. Initially, Jones, together with Jeremy Dixon and Michael Gold, worked for the firm of Frederick Macmanus and Partners, for whom they designed a glassy, Mediterranean block of flats and shops in Clipstone Street in Fitzrovia, a hall of residence for Woolwich Polytechnic and two blocks as part of that ...”

“... actors in my first play, Forty Years On, which was running in the West End. One of the actors was George Fenton, who is doing the music for the film, and another was Keith McNally, the proprietor of Balthazar.15 January. The police officer who shot Mark Duggan is to be returned to firearms duty just as was the officer who shot Jean Charles de Menezes. The Met ...”

“... give himself. He always stopped. He wouldn’t quite go over the top,’ Robert Tear thinks, and Michael Tippett speaks wistfully of Britten’s ‘immense possibilities’. Those possibilities were abundantly evident from the start. The young Britten was a musical prodigy who poured out music in an unstaunchable flood, music which showed him, as a ...”

“... And now, here’s The Pale King, this book-shaped version of the ‘long thing’, assembled by Michael Pietsch, Wallace’s editor on Infinite Jest, from ‘a neat stack of manuscript, 12 chapters totalling nearly 250 pages’ discovered by Wallace’s agent on the desk in his home office, augmented by a selection from ‘hundreds and hundreds’ of less ...”

“... offers a frightening gallery of rogue vents – from Eric von Stroheim in The Great Gabbo to Michael Redgrave in Dead of Night and Anthony Hopkins in Magic – who have been led astray by their dummy-selves; and real vents can be just as mixed up as fictional ones. When the English entertainer Arthur Prince died in 1948, his jolly partner Jim was ...”

“... and animating relationship between the English and their past (his friendship in the 1930s with Michael Oakeshott may have played a part here): ‘Let us praise as a living thing the continuity of our history, and praise the whigs who taught us that we must nurse this blessing – reconciling continuity with change, discovering mediations between past and ...”

“... the war. Had she joined the Forces, she might have escaped what one of her disenchanted courtiers, George Urban, called her ‘Alf Garnett’ view of Germany. As of Hitler, Margaret Thatcher knew exactly what she thought of the European Community. She did not like international organisations as such. She disliked the United Nations and the Commonwealth, and ...”

“... accusations of perversity, hostility and just plain bad intentions. A kinder, gentler unconscious, George Bush might say. Jung could never quite match Freud as a literary persona, but then who can? Jung’s forte was rather his therapeutic attitude. Much of what he had to say about treatment was both humane and wise, very much to be preferred to the ...”

“... all this immensely but, of course, I couldn’t help knowing that it wasn’t all a dream, as in a George Landow film, from which the audience would awake with a jolt at the end of the last reel. I felt that it wasn’t enough to say it was all over now, that Atlantis had finally sunk beneath the sea, carrying with it a utopia which, as Hoberman ...”

“... correspondents – right up to the miners’ strike of 1984-85.’ In a fascinating essay about George Woodcock, the TUC General Secretary in the 1960s, Taylor expresses similar feelings about the unions’ inability to establish a relationship with government which would give them a lasting right to joint decision-making. Woodcock, he says, tried in his ...”

“... prodigy’ – precisely the sort of instinctive apprehension that was lost on someone like George Bernard Shaw, who, equipped as he was with an all-encompassing theory of the world, ‘has all the time been silently comparing humanity with something that was not human’. Shaw was typical of the heresy of sterile intellectualism: ‘all aversions to ...”

“... deployment may well be regarded as a definite threat to peace.’ The principle was invoked by George W. Bush in 2003 and by Donald Trump this year; it’s possible to deplore the methods and motivation for the invasion of Iraq and the attack on Iran while agreeing that self-declared enemies should be prevented from acquiring nuclear weapons. So what ...”