“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... portraits Einstein liked to hang on the walls of his study wherever he lived, two of them – Michael Faraday and James Clerk Maxwell – had devoted themselves to understanding electromagnetism (the third portrait was of Newton).Einstein’s childhood was spent in Munich, where his parents moved a year after he was born, and where in 1881 his ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... It’s tit in some way, it’s an infantile comfort. It’s an infantile comfort that is also a black pit.In its time, the book has had its admirers – my battered 1970s paperback carries endorsements from Richard Hughes, Naomi Mitchison and C.S. Lewis, and Auden was an early fan. (Auden was a patron saint of lost causes. He was also the only major writer ...”

“... moles and domestic terrorism.’ At the Munich Olympics two years earlier, the militant group Black September had killed eleven members of the Israeli team, and called for the release not just of Palestinian prisoners held by Israel but of Andreas Baader and Ulrike Meinhof of the Red Army Faction in West Germany. Chancellor Willy Brandt resigned a month ...”