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“... know his party better’. Other senior Tories whom she also despised, including Boris Johnson and Michael Gove, were summoned back into the fold as cover for her inability to devise a winning Brexit strategy. But Osborne, never. He didn’t stand in the 2017 general election. The dilemma May faced was how to square the circle Brexit had conjured up: on the ...”

“... Opponents of this analysis – notably Matthew Goodwin, whose Revolt on the Right (written with Robert Ford) first identified Ukip voters as older and poorer than the general population – argue that the Leave/Remain faultline is essentially a cultural one. Among working-class voters identified as former or potential Labour supporters, the divisive issue ...”

“... a ‘very profitable market in military equipment’, in the words of the then foreign secretary, Michael Stewart. Even now, a striking number of Middle East rulers are graduates of Sandhurst, including the kings of Bahrain and Jordan, the sultan of Oman, the emir of Dubai, the emir and crown prince of Abu Dhabi, the emir of Qatar, and the late emir of ...”

“... as some of its recent practitioners like to think (he mentions as precursors Maurice Cowling and Michael Bentley), but he gives one of the most impressive proofs to date of its potential to open up understanding of ideological messaging, the importance of which in British politics has seldom been adequately recognised, and has sometimes been virtually ...”

“... Secret service memoirs are invariably rubbished. When Robert Anderson’s Lighter Side of My Official Life appeared in 1910 – Anderson had headed a counter-Fenian agency – Winston Churchill lambasted it in the House of Commons for its ‘gross boastfulness’: ‘It is written, if I may say so, in the style of “How Bill Adams Won the Battle of Waterloo” ...”

“... Britons, a species Banville loves to scrutinise. And Banville has always written well about drink. Robert B. Parker, the last novelist to try on Chandler’s shoes, was a three-books-a-year man – his main hero was a private eye called Spenser – who’d done a PhD on hardboiled literature. His first effort, Poodle Springs (1989), was hampered by a set-up ...”

“... Institute of Advanced Study as an assistant to John von Neumann. A chance meeting with Robert Oppenheimer led to an invitation to talk about the Zipf-Mandelbrot law at the Institute. The talk fell flat, people fell asleep, and a distinguished historian of mathematics stood up and declared he hadn’t understood a word. Mandelbrot was paralysed, but ...”

“... to the invasion of Afghanistan. Some promoters of the liberal Kantian project – for example, Michael Ignatieff – have gone further, embracing the invasion of Iraq as a muscular extension of normative human rights, and in some cases dreaming of yet more humanitarian assaults on targets from Khartoum to Tehran. Victors’ Justice, a collection of seven ...”

“... now the standard work and must stand alongside Ian Kershaw’s Hitler, Ulrich Herbert’s Best and Robert Gerwarth’s Hitler’s Hangman: The Life of Heydrich as one of the landmark Nazi biographies. As the author of a celebrated study of the Holocaust, Longerich is better able than his predecessors to situate Himmler within the vast machinery of ...”

“... followed their example,’ he said in the State of the Union speech. One supportive commentator, Michael Lind of Salon, called the new strategy, with its stress on agility and flexibility, ‘the greatest revolution in American foreign policy in a generation’. Yet the president’s words have a familiar ring. In September 1999 George W. Bush, then a ...”

“... letters to the worthies listed in Who’s Who, and that he managed to get money from the likes of Robert Maxwell, Cliff Richard and Twiggy. Since 1958 Butler had been the co-ordinator of a perennially impoverished study which began by examining the medical, social and economic circumstances of 17,000 babies born in the same week in March 1958, then over ...”

“... Given Greenberg’s disdain for Duchamp, his distaste for Andy Warhol, Jasper Johns and Robert Rauschenberg was predictable. But he also dismissed most other major movements of the 1960s and after: Minimal and Conceptual Art’s high-mindedness; the new art forms that focused on the body and performance; and especially the growth of politically ...”

“... sounds like Chandler, the heroine muses in a Woolfian fugue and so on (the veteran translator Michael Henry Heim was in action here). This time, Canongate has reproduced her polyphony of registers by commissioning three translators to work on the different parts of the book and give the memoir, fiction and essay a different feel. Ugrešić studied in ...”

“... quantity, and more for observation than vision. But in 1927, 45 years after Trollope’s death, Michael Sadleir published a reassessment. He argued that Trollope was a writer with the rare gift of being able to produce memorable books without writing memorable sentences, and probe depths without seeming to move beyond the surface. Interest revived; the ...”

“... the Channel to begin coining money in Antwerp. On 17 July, the bank’s first deputy governor, Michael Godfrey, eager to see war at first hand, strolled into the trenches and found himself crouching alongside the king, who was furious to encounter him there. As Macaulay writes in his History of England,‘Mr Godfrey, you ought not to run these hazards, you ...”