“... president’s dirty mouth’ for failing to anticipate the inexpressive profanity revealed on the White House tapes. One of the high points of Roth Unbound is the extract from the tapes (recorded on 3 November 1971) in which Nixon considers his anti-Roth strategy: NIXON: Roth of course is a Jew. HALDEMAN: Oh yes … he’s brilliant in a sick ...”

“... the centre of the composition, perched with dignity in a sumptuous high-backed leather chair, his white face resting on his right hand, whose wrist is cuffed by a wonderfully fine cambric shirt. Behind the back of his chair, on the right and balancing the Homer but a little lower down the picture, a girl with her back to us stands on tiptoe in stockinged feet ...”

“... can inject into a social landscape in a year. It is nothing new for the non-white immigrant, or would-be immigrant, to have to bear the cost of Europe’s fears for its own stability, but the EU’s wish to keep out asylum seekers is a striking development. Under the International Convention Relating to the Status of Refugees, they are ...”

“... but cappuccino and croissants smell better than diesel fumes, and polished terrazzo flooring and white-enamelled steel have more appeal than sooty brick and the brownish, magnetised dust from cast-iron brake blocks that formerly clung to every metal surface. After all, railways never set out to be ‘atmospheric’, but to perform a valuable and profitable ...”

“... took something of the same form.) Incidentally, Perry Anderson’s general matrix of the ‘White’ intellectual emigration, which suggested that the radical exiles went to America while the conservative ones – with Gellner exempted – settled in England, understates the manner in which Berlin’s Washington period was the making of him.Berlin’s ...”

“... five two-bedroom flats on the upper storeys, one of which is Quinn’s. It was summer and red and white roses were blooming in the block’s communal gardens. Quinn showed me the fruit and vegetables the residents had planted in the spring: raspberries, strawberries, lettuce, onions, peas, beans, radishes. ‘Very optimistically a gentleman is trying to grow ...”

“... tie between patriotism and the climate project, to cover the greening of Britain with red, white and blue, to displace and distract from the far right’s anti-immigrant crusade with a different sort of crusade, one that was both nobly international and explicitly nationalist. Hence, for instance, the name of Ed Miliband’s Great British Energy ...”

“... that are undercut by cheaper providers will need to lower their prices or go bust. (As the 2011 White Paper put it, ‘The government does not guarantee to underwrite universities and colleges. They are independent, and it is not government’s role to protect an unviable institution.’) For that to happen, however, not only must the cheaper providers have ...”

“... had to commit to the new environment and learn to inhabit it. Swaying like a blanched orchid at a Peter Tosh concert was not good enough. Painful reprimands from minorities, in the workplace, the faculty, the televised debate were the stuff of our re-education as Europeans. By the 1980s, in theory at least, minorities and majorities were on an equal ...”

“... that Auden had established in Brooklyn with Carson McCullers, Gypsy Rose Lee, Benjamin Britten, Peter Pears, Chester Kallman, Paul Bowles and Jane Bowles, among others, he wrote in his diary: ‘What an epic one could write about this!’ Soon Golo too moved in, having escaped from the Nazis by walking over the Pyrenees with his uncle Heinrich, Alma Mahler ...”

“... Charles Vaughan, chief of staff of Thiel Capital, owned by the billionaire former Trump supporter Peter Thiel, and Jordan Peterson, who was invited by Orr and other academics to be a visiting fellow at the Cambridge Faculty of Divinity in 2019. After a photo emerged of Peterson with a man wearing a T-shirt with the slogan ‘I’m a proud ...”

“... the Spectator: Ferdinand Mount, former aide to Thatcher, whose The New Few had appeared in 2012; Peter Oborne, whose Triumph of the Political Class was published five years earlier; and Geoffrey Wheatcroft, whose Yo, Blair! came out in 2007. The first looked at the structure of wealth that had emerged in the new century, the second at the character of its ...”

“... fascism – he imagined the change of street names: Prospekt Solzhenitsyn, Vlasov Avenue, White Guard Boulevard – but it would pass. He felt no impulse to political action. Ambition for power or money was foreign to him. Academic by temperament, he loved books, shunned clamour, and was averse to meetings of any sort. There was research to be ...”

“... nous of the Swiss – Henri Nestlé, Rodolphe Lindt, Jean Tobler, Philippe Suchard and Daniel Peter, the inventor of milk chocolate. Just before the end of the First World War, Cadbury and Fry undertook a defensive merger to protect themselves against takeover by Nestlé. It turned out Fry was worth much less than Cadbury; Cadbury accordingly became the ...”

“... in the world, which came into force on 26 January 1950. The document drew on British, American and White Dominion precedents for an original synthesis, combining a strong central executive with a symbolic presidency, a bicameral legislature with reserved seats for minorities, a Supreme Court with robust provincial governments, in a semi-federal structure ...”