“... in Thatcher’s day) allows resentment to be nurtured that the British economy is being unfairly held back by a bunch of unelected technocrats.Britain is not experiencing an economic rerun of the 1970s. Long-run economic growth is lower, inequality far higher and the trade unions less powerful. Inflation, as yet, has nothing to do with wages rising too fast ...”

“... century: Palestinian nationalism one of the least successful. At the Middle East Peace Conference held in Madrid in late October, the Palestinians, for the first time in the entire history of the conflict, began to gain the upper hand in the propaganda battle. It was a historic reversal which cannot fail to affect the course of the Israeli-Palestinian ...”

“... failings, as Thatcher was when it came to her government. Early on in his term, MacGregor held a working breakfast for the industrial and labour correspondents – itself a cause of bitter comment from a group that took pride in its morning bleariness – to demonstrate, with the help of charts and coloured markers, how the markets were moving ...”

“... of the victims is still assumed. The Oedipus myth is one example. There is a plague: Oedipus is held to be responsible on account of the difference-dissolving crimes of incest and parricide, and is banished so that order can be restored. Rather than pure fiction, or the realisation of guilty infantile desires, the story of Oedipus is, Girard claims, another ...”

“... references in the anti-capitalist rhetoric of the Left, though Jews such as the Rothschilds were held up as symbols of capitalism rather than as an ethnic scourge in their own right. The Affair put such rhetoric beyond the pale: henceforth anti-semitism was not just mainly the preserve of the Right, but its exclusive preserve. And there were further ...”

“... not a border), militants came across the Israeli edition of a Brazilian trance festival being held close to Re’im. Almost immediately it became a massacre, with hundreds of festival-goers killed and others taken hostage. In the kibbutzim the fighters targeted the local rapid response forces (in Nir Yitzhak they killed about five armed men), along with ...”

“... alongside Tolkien (MSI activists had set up a Camp Hobbit in 1977). The festival continues to be held, featuring international stars of the far right from Steve Bannon to Viktor Orbán and inevitably – or so it feels nowadays – Elon Musk. By 2004 Meloni had been elected president of the AN’s youth wing, the first woman to lead any such political ...”

“... either as economic success sabotaged by the oil crisis and the consequences of over-tempting loans held out by disingenuous Western bankers, or as hectic boom, unwisely stoked up, and followed by inevitable crash; either as a Westpolitik, shrewdly negotiated with the West Germans, or as mere submission to Moscow’s interests in Brandt’s ...”

“... booked in the Latin Quarter. ‘For security reasons,’ the message ran, ‘the meetings will be held at the home of Michel Foucault.’ I was duly provided with an address, and at ten the next morning I arrived at Foucault’s apartment to find a number of people – but not Sartre – already milling around. No one was ever to explain the mysterious ...”

“... son planned to kill his father and Hildegard’s sons. When Charlemagne had crushed the revolt, he held a big assembly of ‘Franks and other faithful ones’ at Regensburg, Tassilo’s former capital, where death sentences were meted out to the wicked son (Charlemagne commuted it to monastic confinement) and some of his supporters (these were carried ...”

“... Hemingway marathon, to the fling with James Gavin (hero of the 82nd Airborne), to the affair with David Gurewitsch in Cuernavaca, even the marriage to Tom Matthews in 1954 that made her so ‘plain silly happy’ at first: You see, I have chalked it up too well, and see where and how I am caught – and how tightly. Through ignorance, carelessness, pride and ...”

“... with Romanticism’. Hamilton regularly offers materialism as the virtuous alternative. It is held to be politically enabling: the materialist is ‘empowered to participate in the natural excitation and productivity’ of the external world, which is magnificent and mysterious – think of Shelley assuming Mont Blanc to be on his side against Castlereagh ...”

“... into my barn’ (Matthew 13, 30). Religious language with a different resonance is deployed by David Halperin in his Saint Foucault, which bears the subtitle ‘Towards a Gay Hagiography’. Halperin is well aware of the dangerous echo of Saint Genet, Sartre’s overbearing and invasive gloss on another writer’s life and work, but appropriates another ...”

“... between Sybille Bedford’s thirty-year-old life of Aldous and the awaited definitive biography by David Bradshaw. With the passing of time, Murray can tell us things prohibited to his predecessor by discretion and the libel laws. At the same time, like Murray’s other biographies, this one holds the central ground of its subject very ably and maintains a ...”