“... office in an age of strongmen, between Margaret Thatcher’s first election victory in 1979 and Robert Mugabe’s in 1980. Thirty-six years later Dos Santos is still in power. Under his supervision, Angola is not just a development star, but a model of elite self-enrichment and wealth disparity. There are now said to be seven thousand millionaires while ...”

“... of the common good and the unselfishness and ability to administer it’. An Eton teacher, ‘Red Robert’ Birley, had encouraged him to read the Marxist economist Harold Laski and to visit the school’s ‘mission’ in London’s East End, which David had found ‘very useful as it gives me an opportunity of becoming acquainted with members of the middle ...”

“... court infamy with his scabrous biographies of Elvis Presley and John Lennon), the theatre critic Robert Brustein, and others – that helped crack open the shell that released Alex Portnoy into the urban wild. The glum littérateur acquired the gleam of an asylum escapee. Pranked at a breakfast shop by Roth, who mimicked the voice of Goldman’s mother ...”

“... includes the rooms and meals for the presidential entourage billed by the Trump hotels. The Secret Service pays to rent the golf carts they use to follow the president on the links.In New York, as tenants are abandoning Trump Tower, the Trump campaign is renting office space there at $37,500 a month. The offices are largely empty.*Border Patrol agents give a ...”

“... and the Danube basin were for a long time privileged zones – the terrains of St John Philby and Robert Byron, of Norman Douglas and Patrick Leigh-Fermor, of R.W.Seton-Watson and Rebecca West. Sorties farther afield – like Peter Fleming’s expeditions to the Gobi or Matto Grosso – were fewer. Paradoxically, the vast expanse of the Empire itself was not ...”

“... Norway). The second World Cup was therefore an early advertisement of the tournament’s potential service to politically repressive hosts. Even the sentimentalised 1970 World Cup, Wilson reminds us, ‘once you peer beyond the brilliance of Brazil’s football, becomes a much more sinister event. Mexico’s governing PRI was repressive and capable of extreme ...”

“... options before the country, he argued, it should never forget the lesson of the National Health Service, when Labour had been able to override all medical and sectional opposition to the nationalisation without compensation of private ‘charity’ hospitals because it had the authority of Parliament, an action inconceivable in today’s EU, whose rules ...”

“... centre. Through Hunt, Keats met Shelley, Godwin, Wordsworth, Hazlitt, Lamb, the painter Benjamin Robert Haydon, and many others who would challenge and comfort him, patronise and defend him, feud over and around him, get drunk and silly with him, delight and disgust him, and otherwise matter to him during this period of explosive poetic growth in what were ...”

“... sexual pleasure. Michael Hastings’s novel The Frauds (1960) features a gay 14-year-old, while Robert Hutton’s 1958 autobiography, Of Those Alone, gives a straightforward picture of his teenage longings, hanging round in stations and at last being seduced at the age of sixteen by a man of 35: ‘I knew that this was what, both physically and mentally, I ...”

“... thinking a thatched roof was the height of exotic. Everything changed for me with the discovery of Robert Burns: those torn-up fields out there were his fields, those bulldozed farms as old as his words, both old and new to me then. Burns was ever a slave to the farming business: he is the patron saint of struggling farmers and poor soil. But in actual ...”

“... Gudula, and (we are now in the past tense) ‘hearing the bell calling the faithful to the evening service, Charlotte Brontë did something strange and entirely uncharacteristic: she followed the worshippers in.’Charlotte wrote to Emily of that day in 1843 when, alone during the summer holidays, boredom and malaise prompted her, despite her staunch ...”

“... in the cubicle for a few minutes, then went out and used his apartment keycard to hide in the service stairwell. Eventually, a call came from Ramona on her friend’s phone. She was slightly horrified to discover he was still in the building and told him again to get out. He, too, had a rental car, and had the key in his pocket. He went down sixty flights ...”