“... to the rising sun, and at five o’clock one saw all those hundreds of workers looking like little black figures fanning out on all sides.’ (This was August 1877, long before he had ever touched a brush.) Beauty was to be found among the rough hands of those workers, rather than in slick nudes, so he told his uncle, to the dealer’s disapproval: ‘Sorrow ...”

“... son. When he was in his early teens he lost both his parents and two of his three brothers in the Black Death. From these ill-starred beginnings he rose by cautious degrees to control an international trading and banking network with branches in Florence, Pisa, Genoa, Avignon, Barcelona, Valencia and Majorca. He anticipated the Florentine big-hitters of the ...”

“... was recast by Noble and Webster, with some professional help from Adjaye, as a light-swallowing black monolith, a stockade: a poke-in-the-eye, style-magazine intruder that seemed to have been there all along, waiting for this moment. Dealing in novelty and artifice, the Shoreditch artists, under the insidious influence of place, were drawn to engage with ...”

“... this, but the best is probably to begin with its dedication. The book is devoted to the memory of Michael Oakeshott – whose thought, Mount tells us, has left its traces, ‘no doubt sadly smudged’, on many of its pages. At first glance, the affinity between author and authority seems straightforward enough, for Oakeshott was widely held to be the most ...”

“... between the upper and the lower cases. Almost everyone is some sort of nationalist, including even Michael Forsyth, the new Tory Secretary of State for Scotland. In retreat, the Conservatives have discovered that true Unionism awarded Scotland just as much nationalism as was good for it, via Scots Law, institutional autonomy and new devices like the National ...”

“... news editors on other papers demanding similar stuff from their own reporters in Brussels. Conrad Black, then the owner of the Telegraph and himself on the receiving end of several Johnson lies, was delighted. When Johnson was about to become prime minister in the summer of 2019, Black saluted his old employee, who ‘was ...”

“... in it and sent it east, in the hope of helping Russia by taking Constantinople and opening up the Black Sea. In the weeks after Brooke’s death landings were finally made on the Gallipoli peninsula and many of his battalion were gunned down by Turks positioned on the high ground; 11 of its 15 officers were lost by the end of June.Brooke was buried a few ...”

“... Robin got a gun for Belli and they went to track the injured leopard with Belli’s dog, an old black labrador, and a team of beaters. Belli found it in the forest, resting against a boulder, and hit it with another shot. It found the strength to flee, got as far as a stretch of open ground bounded by the rim of a thousand-foot precipice, and sat down ...”

“... on purpose to trap Heinz, Paula by accident. When Erich bangs up Paula, Paula’s dad beats her black and blue. Once they are married, Erich will also beat her black and blue. Erich’s only interest in life apart from his moped is beer. The dismal confinement of these rural destinies is understood as economic, but for ...”

“... sightseers awaiting the arrival of the more spectacularly sick. As I was borne in on a stretcher, black-shawled ladies gazed down at me, raised their eyes to heaven, and crossed themselves; I was obviously a goner. In more sophisticated medical surroundings I would, of course, have been in no danger at all, as all that had happened was that a duodenal ulcer ...”

“... read. Smile brightly. Bluff like a politician in a glass booth being manipulated by semaphoring black-suited attendants with clipboards. So? ‘All for the best in the best of all possible Londons,’ says the mayor, says the minister, says Joanna Lumley. ‘All for the best,’ say the entitled, the connected, the stakeholders, the investors and the ...”

“... of the New Left in the region, subsidising Jamaica under its social democratic prime minister Michael Manley, and Nicaragua after the Sandinista revolution in 1979. But by 1983 oil prices had collapsed and Venezuela’s two-party system had begun its long unravelling.Chávez, then, is best understood as an heir to the ideals of the NIEO, and its quixotic ...”

“... helping to keep white liberal panellists occupied and furrowed until the ferocious later phase of Black Power made them all squirm.) Kazin had been unable to attend the symposium itself but, never one to miss a party, popped into the reception being thrown by Commentary’s editor-in-chief Norman Podhoretz and his wife, the writer and editor Midge Decter, one ...”

“... nightmare, 20 more crates filled with letters. Selekt’s crates are yellow and stamped with the black hunting horn logo of Deutsche Post, the former German state mail monopoly that, like its Dutch counterpart, was privatised long ago. For years the two have been locked in a struggle for business on the streets of the Netherlands, part of a fratricidal ...”

“... now ambulance men ban kiss of life’; ‘Policeman flees Aids victim.’ In the early days, Michael Adler of Middlesex Hospital remembered, it was very difficult to get them hospitalised, it was very difficult to get patients treated as normal human beings. People were frightened, they thought it was contagious, the patients had to be put in side ...”