“... The diary contains endless disquisitions on arses and excrement and masturbation: along with Lloyd George and Diaghilev, Nijinsky’s arsehole becomes one of the diary’s most frequent sources of irritation. Romola spent her life protecting himself from himself. She also proved zealous when it came to the business of protecting herself – and the world’s ...”

“... In 1904, George Bernard Shaw announced that there was now ‘no reasonable excuse for refusing to face the fact that nothing but a eugenic religion can save our civilisation’; in 1912, Major Leonard Darwin, Charles Darwin’s son, jubilantly launched a campaign for eugenic legislation designed ‘to stamp out feeble-mindedness from future generations’; and in 1919, Margaret Sanger, founder of Planned Parenthood, was keen to articulate her mission in eugenic terms: ‘More children from the fit, less from the unfit – that is the chief issue of birth control ...”

“... serve in the occupation of Iraq and Afghanistan. The main road to Tbilisi airport was named after George W. Bush, who on a visit in 2005 proclaimed: ‘The American people are with you.’ Despite this, Putin appeared, initially at least, to be prepared to indulge his southern neighbour. Saakashvili’s takeover had been facilitated by the Russian foreign ...”

“... life can give us,’ the revolutionary John Maclean said at his trial for sedition in 1918. George Square, 31 January 1919 My grandparents met at a Glasgow ILP branch sometime around the end of the First World War, and I’ve always had a rather romantic view of the party and of that period, helped along by my mother’s stories of their family friend ...”

“... of mental imbalance and upset which became so fashionable in the 1720s and 1730s, and which George Cheyne christened ‘the English malady’. For sufferer as for healer, an organic condition was a real condition, not a mere maladie imaginaire. Moreover, as long as, ‘ “superstitious” causes and “magical” cures still had their popular ...”

“... be shot in the leg. At the time of the Black Lives Matter protests relating to the murder of George Floyd, he tweeted: ‘when the looting starts, the shooting starts.’ In July 2017, he advised police officers not to be ‘too nice’ when handling suspects. He praised someone for body-slamming a reporter and encouraged supporters at a rally before the ...”

“... assimilate Indians by teaching them to farm (even though they had been doing so for centuries), to Andrew Jackson’s Indian removal, Grant’s ‘peace policy’ and Roosevelt’s Indian New Deal – the fact is that whites from the outset coveted Indian land and eventually succeeded in acquiring almost all of it, sweeping aside periodic resistance with ...”

“... very wealthy are allowed their eccentricities. Only a few, like Lord Lyttelton, demurred: ‘As George Bowes’s vanity descends with his estate to his daughter, I don’t wish to see her my daughter-in-law, though she would make my son the richest, and consequently, in her present ideas of greatness, one of the great peers of the Realm.’ In 1767 she ...”

“... for a career. As a dispenser of life’s prizes William hardly compared with his elder brother George, who was chairman of the East India Company and a Member of Parliament for the City of London, and who could steer a man towards a governorship of a province worth as much as many a bishopric. Lyall’s clients seem not to have entered holy orders from any ...”

“... of the people she had invited to dinner had refused to come because Radji was going to be there (George Sanders was right – always check out your fellow guests). Radji slams her for ‘tactlessness’. But this is just the sort of thing he needed to know. An interesting case of the discriminating guest is Anthony Howard, then editor of the New ...”

“... at something he finds hard to bear. The brief biographies of 19th-century alienists through which Andrew Scull, Charlotte MacKenzie and Nicholas Hervey tell the story of the century’s dealings with the mad make it clear that Morison’s haunted expression could have been that of any of the seven ‘mad-doctors’ described here. The first of them was born ...”

“... Bunting, Charles Tomlinson, Ted Hughes, Robert Graves, Hugh MacDiarmid, J.M. Synge, David Jones, George Steiner, Geoffrey Hill, Elizabeth Daryush and the fraternity of poets anthologised by Andrew Crozier and Tim Longville in A Various Art. It also includes a number of Davie’s poems. If we were to read the adjective ...”

“... On the verge of office in 1964, he appeared to more than one observer as a latter-day Lloyd George, a radical tribune sprung from provincial nonconformity to drive the nation before him with wit and moral exhortation. After leaving office for the last time, he was more widely compared to Stanley Baldwin, a national conciliator and broker of industrial ...”

“... will therefore eventually settle down peacefully under the benign hegemony of the US. Yet, as Andrew Bacevich points out in one of the most acute analyses of America to have appeared in recent years, the United States itself is in many ways a militaristic country, and becoming more so: at the end of the Cold War, Americans said yes to military power. The ...”

“... the colour of a toad’s back’. Wedderburn is thought to be the central figure depicted in George Cruikshank’s anti-abolitionist, racist print The New Union Club of 1819, in which derogatory stereotypes of African men and women commingle with white abolitionists in a drunken, debauched frenzy.He was active during a period of political uncertainty ...”