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“... and ambition might be enough in themselves to propel the humblest of citizens from log cabin to White House is a vital ingredient in the American Dream. Indeed, it has served as a powerful anaesthetic against the inequalities of American society. But for how much longer? A rampant dynasticism – verging on royalism – threatens the efficacy of this ...”

“... recent vampire craze. The romantic interest would be a sulky boy called something like Darren or Edmund who was secretly a vampire or a werewolf, and not so secretly attracted to the weird chick. By the end of the story, they had kissed.The OED defines fan fiction as ‘fiction, usually fantasy or science fiction, written by a fan rather than a professional ...”

“... of Kemal Ataturk, the struggles in Germany between left and right before the Nazis took over, the White Russian diaspora in Paris and Berlin, and the energetically anti-semitic immigration procedures adopted by the United States to keep out Jews trying to flee from Hitler’s Europe. Informative though several of these essays are, they do mischief to the ...”

“... sort of plot and the two men were buried alongside each other and their graves marked by plain white marble slabs bearing just their names and dates. Family photographs show both graves strewn with wreaths and flowers and Alfred’s headstone has an ornate wire frame fixed behind it, covered with more flowers. Amelia and Albert were the only mourners at ...”

“... is ‘naturalising’. Nature has served as a revolutionary concept in its day, while from Edmund Burke to Michael Oakeshott the notion of culture has been for the most part a conservative one. When the political regimes of 18th-century Europe heard the word nature, they reached for their cultural privileges. The notion that everything is ...”

“... implicitly (and sometimes, in my experience, explicitly) favour submission to Providence. Edmund Burke and Brexitists ought not to agree on much, but Brexitists do seem to share Burke’s belief that ‘the awful Author of our Being is the Author of our place in the order of existence … Having disposed and marshalled us by a divine tactic, not ...”

“... New York, as he did Berlin. His autobiography had appeared two years before, celebrated by Edmund Wilson in the New Yorker, who compared Grosz’s new Cape Cod paintings to Dürer. German museums were starting to reacquire his older works. But Grosz was already in the midst of his slow American suicide. ‘I’m a poor wretch, that’s the simple exact ...”

“... his assisting in his mother’s school; his marriage to his high-school sweetheart, Elinor White; their ten-year stay on a New Hampshire farm given to Frost by his grandfather; the early deaths of two of their six children; the brief two-and-a-half year escape to England, where Frost’s first book, A Boy’s Will (reviewed enthusiastically by ...”

“... tweets. Devotees of Wicca also call themselves witches. In fiction and legend, witches can be white or black, good or bad: they can be heroines and healers or hexing hags. What strange classification can bracket such diversity, from nursery tales to the blackest crimes? Roald Dahl offers a clue in The Witches, where he suggests that real witches don’t ...”

“... his name: this happiness is what finally convinces us that he truly didn’t miss all that White Russian money, gone up to heaven like vapour. Gradually he becomes famous, and is persecuted with so many questions about nymphets and Freud that some essential openness closes, the openness you see in the early letters to ...”

“... in the austere Gallimard uniform, bearing a red publicity band with the single name MALRAUX in white capital letters. An undiscovered novel? Far from it. This was a compilation of writings by Napoleon Bonaparte that Malraux had made almost anonymously in 1930, and published as Vie de Napoléon par lui-même. The publishers obviously felt that ...”

“... French general whose attention was ‘chiefly attracted’, as he later reported, by the enormous white reticule embroidered with ‘a fat poodle in gold’ that Victoria carried on her first official visit to his country, was not likely to mistake her for the Empress Eugénie. Though Munich argues, reasonably enough, that Victoria’s dowdiness did not mean ...”

“... modernised the English of the original, and carries the same series of charming black and white reproductions of illuminations from the magnificent Bibliothèque Nationale manuscript of the Livre. It also carries the enthusiastic foreword to the 1904 edition by the then president of the United States, Theodore Roosevelt, which has an interest for ...”

“... first place. The Lion’s Head was gone, but there was still the Beatrice Inn, still Thomas’s White Horse Tavern, still the beautiful red Village Cigars. And there were still a few of the older solitary women you don’t see much on the street anymore, with dyed black hair, eccentric hats and furtive eyes and the garish smear of lipstick that marks the ...”

“... life: it dealt a ‘decisive blow … to the unhurried “gentlemanly” style of business’, as Edmund de Rothschild put it. Warburg himself later claimed that he disliked the whole episode and would have preferred a friendly deal. But there can be no doubt that the rapid increase of the bank’s business dated from the moment he showed he was able to take ...”