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“... to sound, to all but the most satirical minds, like truth and reason. They sound like honour and service and sacrifice and virtue, monuments of logic, and even cashing in is orderly, a triumph of calculation – you don’t have to ask your lymph glands about it or look at your spilling entrails. You might think the idea of a sequel to Catch-22 was a ...”

“... candidate for the position of staff counsel to McCarthy’s investigating committee. His rival was Robert F. Kennedy, whose father and older brother were McCarthy supporters. These two intensely ambitious and utterly ruthless young men, as alike as peas in a pod, hated each other. Their rivalry ended only with Bobby’s death. Cohn got the much sought-after ...”

“... to form its own organisation, which, if not paramilitary, would at least replace military service by non-combatant service. This was the Chantiers de la Jeunesse. Its director, General de La Porte du Theil, a kind of Vercingetorix, ‘the peasant with the long moustaches’, was eventually arrested by the Gestapo in ...”

“... this young man, the son of a postal worker, born as one world war ends and thus of ideal age for service in the next. His home was Joppa, on the Firth of Forth, a ‘tram heaven’ boasting as it did one of the last cable tram systems (did he ever marvel at Glasgow’s strange-smelling subway in which coaches latched onto an ever-moving cable?). But steam ...”

“... of hundreds of bureaucrats based a few steps away from the White House. At the beginning of his service, Bolton writes, he sized Trump up as an inexperienced and impulsive administrator who had been poorly served by his ministers. Bolton says he believed that Trump’s paranoid and dogmatic tendencies were not innate, and clung to hopes that the president ...”

“... discipline and a privileging of civil obedience above family honour, to inculcate an ethic of service to the commonweal which was thought to have characterised the Roman senatorial class. Tiptoft’s hopes look hollow in the light of the manoeuvrings that followed Edward’s unexpected death in 1483, but his insular version of Machiavellian virtù was to ...”

“... its music? The musicologist and advocate of the Scots language Billy Kay feels passionately about Robert Fergusson, the wild-child poet who died in the Edinburgh bedlam at 24. In Stromness, Montrose, Lochgelly, Stirling, he recited Fergusson’s verses. And then Karine Polwart sang the song that the dying Fergusson loved more than any other: ‘The Birks of ...”

“... London or Paris, and not the dialectical Freud of Lionel Trilling’s vision (‘we are ill in the service of health, or ill in the service of life’), but the Freud of much analytic practice in New York, and especially of the clinical lingo of the patients themselves. ‘Her Freudian leanings structured her life,’ Robins ...”

“... them with his own loyal troops, he stripped them of their uniforms, dismissed them from service and forbade them to come within a hundred miles of Rome on pain of death. Severus then constituted a new, hand-picked Guard from the best of the troops who had followed him. The auction story is impossible to resist and Guy de la Bédoyère duly starts ...”

“... at every street corner. They saw the end, even for the most renewable resources. One of these was Robert Lamb, who in 1979 published a book called World without Tree. ‘A survey of current evidence,’ he wrote, ‘shows that trees could be so scarce in a mere thirty years’ time that they would already be struggling to fulfil their purpose in the global ...”

“... The belief underlies his veneration for the great ‘talking heads’ like Lord Clark and Robert Hughes, as in a more general way it underlies his love affair with British TV ‘culture’ when it is not merely mausoleum-like. Clearly James’s feeling for British culture is that of the outsider who can dissimulate an insider’s manner, but who will ...”

“... and don’t get anywhere within hailing distance of Jenkins Ear. The date is significant: Robert Walpole had died in 1745, and a year later his son’s arrested political development brings him back to the quarrels of a previous generation. Many people are liberated by the death of a dominant parent: Horace felt the full burden of his past only when ...”

“... effects of denunciations. Unfortunately, her account lacks the imaginative and literary power of Robert Conquest’s The Great Terror. ‘In the Soviet case,’ she writes, in a fairly typical passage, ‘ “manipulative” denunciations should be considered part of a complex of informal mechanisms of citizen agency, including client-patron relations and ...”

“... Film Festival in 1962) and screenwriter: his credits include Downhill Racer (1969), starring Robert Redford as a champion skier. His novel about mountaineering, Solo Faces (1979), started life as a script for Redford. As well as subsidising some unprofitable novels, the movie business brought Salter into contact with a more hedonistic world: he spent ...”

“... came looking for him. For the next twenty or so years he lived abroad at the court of his cousin, Robert of Normandy. He and Alfred remained, however, the last known representatives of ‘the royal blood’ of England. In 1036 both mounted invasions against their stepbrother Harold Harefoot. Neither invasion succeeded. Alfred was captured under obscure ...”