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“... His father, General Vladimir de Staël von Holstein, was vice-governor of the Fortress of St Peter and St Paul, where famous liberals had been incarcerated at the Tsar’s pleasure. His mother came from a more cultivated family, and was related to the composer Glazunov. At the outbreak of the Revolution in 1917, the family was compelled to leave ...”

“... in a country less than a third of the size of the Russian empire. In an essay published in 1997, Peter Holquist argued that the purpose of this apparatus – which also existed in similar, if not always equally extensive, forms in fascist and liberal-democratic states – was not policing per se. The Okhrana wanted to find deviants and punish crime; the ...”

“... Neal Ascherson, Ilya Budraitskis, James Butler, Andrew Cockburn, Meehan Crist, Sheila Fitzpatrick, Peter Geoghegan, Jeremy Harding, Owen Hatherley, Abby Innes, Mimi Jiang, Thomas Jones, Laleh Khalili, Jackson Lears, Donald MacKenzie, Thomas Meaney, James Meek, Pankaj Mishra, Azadeh Moaveni, Jan-Werner Müller, Vadim Nikitin, Jacqueline Rose, Jeremy ...”

“... of scarlet in evidence, in the robes of the assembled Council and of sundry invited academics, white in the vestments of the local clergy, and a respectable quantity of gold in the mayoral chains of office; there are any number of sombre grey suits on visiting diplomats and corporate sponsors; and outside the sunshine, if there is any, glints from the ...”

“... isn’t an uneccentric figure himself. He’s best known as the amateur historian of fiercely White Russian sympathies who was ordered to pay Lord Aldington £1.5 million in libel damages in 1989 after accusing him of war crimes for his involvement in repatriating troops to Yugoslavia and the Soviet Union after the Second World War. (The award was later ...”

“... which Rose takes in The 21st-Century Brain. I recall a lovely book by James Thurber and E.B. White, Is Sex Necessary?, among other things a spoof on sex manuals. In their day (1929) these handbooks had a lot of drawings of genital organs, with parts labelled, that made no sense at all. Thurber and White proposed these ...”

“... They should stop fishwives throwing the guts of mackerel carelessly away, perhaps to besmirch the white silk stockings of a foreigner who would then conceive a very bad opinion of law and order in Britain. This man was serious, and so was a critic who, ridiculing the idea that the appearance of Macheath on stage was a chief cause of crime, offered to reveal ...”

“... Puzo, Friedman, Brooks and the screenwriter David Zelag Goodman. Kurt Vonnegut began to show up. Peter Matthiessen was considered but rejected for mentioning too often his membership in the Institute of Arts and Letters. ‘It’s an organisation,’ Puzo said, ‘for guys who can’t get screen deals.’ Barring Vogel, the core members all got screen ...”

“... goes by initials. Hilda Doolittle also wrote under pen names – Delia Alton, Edith Gray, Rhoda Peter and Helga Dart – but she never published under any of them. Inscribing herself as H.D.  (well before Ezra Pound ushered her into literary history as ‘H.D. Imagiste’) she wasn’t swerving from prejudicial gendering so much as ridicule ...”

“... set out their ‘pathways to impact’.* ‘Success as a Knowledge Economy’, a 2016 government White Paper, rehearsed the usual clichés about the importance to the economy of research and tuition, but its true purpose was the construction of a genuinely competitive market in higher education, with new ‘providers’ entering and existing ones exiting. An ...”

“... from the New Deal settlement, which had privileged industrial workers and households headed by white men. The movement to curb state spending eventually led to a series of monetary and fiscal experiments, beginning in 1979 with the dramatic increase of interest rates under the Federal Reserve chair Paul Volcker and continuing with Reagan’s tax ...”

“... were so many Saturday evening light entertainment shows with sleazy male comedians, groups of white male singers in blackface, teams of young women in uncomfortable outfits kicking like horses trained to do dressage. At the time I had no words for the wretched feelings such programmes gave me, but looking back on it ‘WE’RE NOT BEAUTIFUL, WE’RE NOT ...”

“... man’. Clara Saint, however, spoke to the French border police, one of whom happened to be a White Russian. Plain-clothed officers took up position close to where Nureyev was sitting with his minders. All he had to do was go up to them and ask for freedom, which he duly did. There was a brief tug-of-war, with Nureyev in the middle, until the French ...”

“... not only on one politician or party, and least of all on the Civil Service and the executive. Peter Jenkins of the Guardian was the first to get it right, when he told a protest rally: ‘This is Parliament’s war!’ The end of the Falklands affair was not difficult to condemn either. The problem of the islands had been rendered far more ...”

“... to get away with his career in the Colonial Service, one of open opposition to the enrichment of white colonists by an exploitation of black subjects. Rumbled finally and called home, he retired to a small, exquisite Elizabethan house in Oxfordshire to write a blazing exposé of the relations between white capital and ...”