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“... To live in the Nineties is to have first-hand experience of l’entre-siècle, a useful word I picked up from Kenneth Silver. Expect to see signs of what Henri Focillon in his book on the year 1000 identified as ‘centurial mysticism’, an affliction even more likely to be endemic when the century that is ending is also ending a millennium. These chronological divisions are meaningless in themselves, but, as Focillon argued, we tend to project onto them aspirations and anxieties which have quite other sources ...”

“... The​ Rev. Thomas Robert Malthus liked to look on the bright side. True, that hasn’t been the usual assessment: his Essay on the Principle of Population (1798) was intended to drench the parade of Enlightenment optimism about human possibility. The Radical writer Richard Price reckoned that an expanding population was a good thing, and that it would follow inevitably from more virtuous forms of government ...”

“... the everyday now, as indeed it must have done then.From his grandfather, the sightless Senator Thomas Gore of Oklahoma (common ancestor with the current Vice-President, whom Vidal refuses to meet because of his connection to Martin Peretz’s plaything, the New Republic), the boy became steeped in American political lore and in the unending battle between ...”

“... characters, but the basic structure is the same: a kind of magical-realist autofiction, as if Thomas Mann’s Buddenbrooks were rewritten on mescaline. Schulz’s own adjective for this kind of writing was ‘mythical’, but this might give the uninitiated reader too Homeric an impression. It’s true that there are flickers of classical mythology, in ...”

“... of opinion. What were once social democratic parties now rely largely on the votes of what Thomas Piketty has called the ‘Brahmin left’: the liberal-minded yet privileged section of society, whose one shared experience is higher education.In recent years, as liberalism has faltered, universities have been dragged into political conflicts to which ...”

“... The new ideology was fiercely resisted by the upholders of older pieties. In Utopia (1516), Sir Thomas More, though himself a considerable landowner, denounces the powerful magnates who ‘enclose all into pastures’ and demolish houses and entire villages to make sheep runs. ‘The rich men, not only by private fraud but also by common laws, do every day ...”

“... to the alternatives. Mrs Thatcher was a philosophical conservative for whom the ideas of Hayek and Friedman were paramount: capitalism was practically superior to the alternatives, but that was intimately tied to the fact that it was morally better. It’s a claim that ultimately goes back to Adam Smith in the third book of The Wealth of Nations. In one sense ...”