“... the assumption of male dominance in family life that Ashbee found most unattractive in his father. Young Ashbee went to Wellington, where he later indicated he had been unhappy, although the school records show him succeeding and conforming. After school, refusing to enter the family firm, he went to Cambridge. He was very happy there: ‘only the best and ...”

“... ago come to exercise such unquestioned dominance? I think the best base camp for this excursion is Edward Luttwak’s article ‘Why Fascism Is the Wave of the Future’, in the LRB of 7 April 1994. At the time, this essay, delivered in Luttwak’s inimitable style, at once torrential and precise, must have seemed utterly counterintuitive, appearing as it did ...”

“... according to Stanley Crouch, ‘one could see the signal bright red cover almost everywhere that young people were gathered.’) The book was Cruse’s response to the failures of the civil rights movement, and his sharp criticism of Black intellectuals, and their timid integrationism, appealed to student activists. But he also found Marxism and Black ...”

“... life of That Most Excellent Citizen and Uncorrupted Member of Parliament, as his first biographer Edward Thompson described him in 1776, the year of James Barry’s engraving. Andrew Marvell, whose father was an Anglican clergyman, was born in the East Riding of Yorkshire in 1621, and entered Trinity College, Cambridge in 1633 at the age of 12. He left ...”

“... elite schools: the progressive Minta gymnasium alone produced Szilárd and his fellow physicists Edward Teller (who rejoiced in the initials E.T.) and Nicholas Kurti, the engineer Theodore von Kármán, and the economists Nicholas Kaldor and Thomas Balogh. They were overwhelmingly Jewish or from a Jewish background. Almost all were non-observant, some ...”

“... first work by Lorck that caught my eye was a small print that shows an Oriental scene, with a tall young man seen in profile wrapped in a cloak and with a steepling turban on his head; behind him, drawn in such a way as to flatten depth and perspective, stands a ziggurat with curls of smoke billowing out, positioned to make a sly rhyme with the man’s ...”

“... The British Ambassador in Constantinople reported that Jews were behind the revolution of the Young Turks of 1908, a complete nonsense. ‘I do not think it is easy to exaggerate the international power of the Jews,’ the Foreign Office Under-Secretary Lord Robert Cecil said. Segev quotes a character in The Thirty-Nine Steps airing the common prejudice ...”

“... wider xenophobia. But of course it wasn’t just the press. Few prime ministers in the years since Edward Heath signed us into the EEC have found it either natural or politically expedient to enthuse about Europe. I grew tired of hearing Major and then Blair insisting that we were ‘at the heart of Europe’ when we hadn’t joined the euro or signed up to ...”

“... usually have a down on horse-play, having been swots when at school and being exposed to the rough young afterwards. I feel with my colleagues there entirely. I would greatly dislike having to engage in horse-play, let alone be horse-played upon. But it is no use talking as if only low-class criminals behaved like this: within living memory, the chief danger ...”

“... No lie, no British participation in the invasion. Oborne quotes Churchill’s reply in 1940 to a young rating on a battleship who asked him whether everything he told them was true: ‘Young man, I have told many lies for my country, and will tell many more.’ In wartime, and in sterling crises too, Oborne accepts that ...”

“... or his reviewers in the Arab world thought. For most admirers, the scuffed surfaces and – as Edward Said wrote later – the ‘formlessness’ of the novel were authentic reflections of the civil war. And so this landmark on the road of ‘post-Mahfouzian’ fiction, welcome in literary circles where Mahfouz’s stature seemed vaguely unsettling, was ...”

“... cannot imagine how the world of singers went on in the days when “Tara’s Halls”, and “The young May Moon”, and “The Meeting of the Waters”, were strains unborn.’ One of the clearest signs of how rapidly and how widely the song became popular is the inclusion of the Avoca Meeting on the tourist trail. The song and the place became popular ...”

“... interest is the section where Atlas gives a draft of the work in progress to the social scientist Edward Shils – a long-time colleague and frenemy of Bellow’s at the University of Chicago – to vet for errors, misemphases, solecisms and overall tone and conditioning, much as the critic Dwight Macdonald had served as the gruff, avuncular sounding board ...”

“... fund of the World Bank, run by Hilda Ochoa-Brillembourg, who liked to make bets on up-and-coming young fund managers with something to prove. She ended up letting Bridgewater go, because ‘for all Dalio’s grandiloquence, the trades that Bridgewater had recommended for the World Bank were essentially just bets on whether interest rates would rise or ...”

“... from France to Germany. Wrongly – wilfully, as it turned out – it had been attributed to the young Jewish artillery captain, the rising star at the headquarters of the General Staff of the French army, Alfred Dreyfus. To put it simply, Dreyfus had been framed. In 1894, he was court-martialled, convicted of treason and then in 1895 deported to Devil’s ...”