“... 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 ...”

“... the Geschwister-Scholl Prize – named after the founders of the anti-Nazi resistance group White Rose – had suddenly become an antisemite. The accusation, it transpired, had little to do with BDS activism and was based on a wilful misreading of Mbembe’s 2016 essay ‘The Society of Enmity’, which argued that Israel is a settler colony and that ...”

“... its role in strengthening the North’s position in negotiations with the US. The New York Times White House reporter David Sanger has published so many ‘scoops’ from US Intelligence that some of his colleagues just call him ‘Scoop’. Unfortunately, quite a few have been wrong. Sanger has been particularly good at omitting all the CIA’s ...”

“... hunter, like the army colonels and senior plantation managers whose stories he listened to in the white men’s club in Kotagiri, who told him that when killing big cats you needed to aim for a good breaking shot into the heart. I suspect that the day he and Belli killed the leopard was the best of his life. He was only 25, and the empire had given him ...”

“... specific note in a colour scale or spectrum). Not pink cloth with gold brocading, then, or white with silver stripes and a light purple cloak, but an entirely felt-through (seen) gold-rose and silver-grey; the first in inimitable dialogue with the separated gold-yellow and green next to it; the second shimmering exactly strongly enough to answer the ...”

“... Engineering with Business Management from York. Rowed throughout my degree – proud to be that white rose. Showed those public school $%^&’s how to do it properly. Making bombs and other stuff for a living – would tell you more but I’d have to kill you. [A reference to his work for QinetiQ.] Getting married to the most amazing woman in the world ...”

“... snaps, is a necrophile’s delight: photograph after photograph, in tiny, eye-straining black and white, of crosses, graves, plaques, inscriptions, bombed-out block-houses converted into monuments, decaying trench relics, dank rows of cypresses, grassed-over mine and shell craters, obscene-looking barrows, and yet more crosses and graves. Some of the photos ...”

“... Double Standards’, to provide intellectual cover for a return to the Cold War policies of red-white-and-blue anti-Sovietism. Timerman became an almost mystical personification of the Carter policy, and his book evoked harsh counter-attacks by Kirkpatrick’s allies, in Commentary, in the Zionist magazine Midstream and elsewhere. Paradoxically the start of ...”

“... accommodation above, with the lease belonging to Henrietta Roberts (later Dombey), the daughter of Michael Roberts and Janet Adam Smith. What occasioned Rupert’s interest was his having been to look at a very grand house for his magazine (World of Interiors), the expensive decoration of which included several Ben Nicholsons. This reminded me that over the ...”

“... he came to call his ‘Empire Crusade’. This was the notion that the empire (or at least the ‘white Dominions’) should form a global protectionist bloc, economically united internally but imposing tariffs on imports from outside countries. Forgotten now, but recognisably reborn in aspects of the Brexit fantasy and in the structures of the European ...”

“... had no source but Beer it had to be discarded. Out went an early love interest, Helen Trent, whose white arms were ‘the most beautiful … I ever saw’. Out went Crane’s dismissal of Tolstoy’s The Kreutzer Sonata – ‘an old maid’s picnic’ so boring, Crane said (maybe), that he couldn’t finish it. Out went several significant details in a story ...”

“... that it succeeded at Lenin’s expense, a triumphant negation of Lenin’s success. Back in 1984, Michael Scammell wrote a fine warts-and-all biography of Solzhenitsyn which was forced to end on a note of uncertainty. Had Solzhenitsyn blown his great international success of the 1970s by retreating into angry exile in Vermont to write a multi-volume epic of ...”

“... it into social democrats whom Washington can work with, and demagogues who must be contained. As Michael Reid, an editor at the Economist, puts it, it is ‘hard to overstate what is at stake in this ideological rivalry, this battle for Latin America’s soul’ between liberal democrats and a new generation of knights errant who have learned to manipulate ...”

“... the psychologically ruined war veteran Septimus Smith. In that novel the two didn’t meet, though Michael Cunningham, refracting the material in The Hours, had his modern-day Clarissa figure care for Richard, his version of Septimus, worn down by the struggle with HIV. The ending, suicide by jumping, was the same in both books.Murphy has set out, in ...”

“... in 2005 to act as trustee, with directorships given to two royal family officials (Alan Reid and Michael Stevens) and, most recently, the duke of Buccleuch, Scotland’s second largest private landowner. The Balmoral estate has been valued at £80 million – assets include the 167-room castle, 81 residential properties, commercial forestry plantations, a ...”