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“... and I’m small and in their care. Help!’ She continued: ‘So I had to be my own person very young.’ At the age of seven, she disabused herself of religion ‘because Genesis raised a lot of questions for me’. At the age of ten, in 1953, Mitchell was diagnosed with polio and hospitalised for months hundreds of miles from home. (Her mother visited her ...”

“... and Susan Ramsay, the wives of notable future governor-generals, became her ladies-in-waiting. The young Lord Dalhousie organised her first visits outside London. In the years that followed, an increasing flow of petitions came to her and Albert from India, as well as a stream of gifts, both splendid and humble, the latter often handicrafts, which she much ...”

“... of the seemingly unshakeable bipartisan commitment to US global hegemony has been produced by young US-based thinkers on the left, unshackled from Cold War groupthink: Asli Bâli, Aziz Rana, Jeanne Morefield, Nicholas Mulder, Christy Thornton, Daniel Bessner, Stephen Wertheim, Samuel Moyn et al. Their views share a sense of the incapacity of US force to ...”

“... continued picking up nubile girls with aplomb, including (says Robert Schanke) a ‘tubercular young British actress who was a waitress in a coffee shop’. Once one might have welcomed such a seduction, fang marks, TB and all. I remember much relishing de Acosta’s gossipy 1960 autobiography, Here Lies the Heart, when it was reissued by an American gay ...”

“... of self-radicalisation why the words ‘socialism’ and ‘imperialism’ became meaningful to a young generation of Americans during what he calls ‘the most incredible of eras – the era of a black president’. There is a conspicuous analytical lacuna here, and it results from an overestimation, increasingly commonplace in the era of Trump, of the most ...”

“... he’d applied for an academic job at a university in Iran. The man’s home videos with his young son reminded him of himself and his own father, and he suddenly realised that the documents he was about to leak would separate him from his family for ever. Snowden​ had reason to believe that those leaks might have little impact. In the summer of ...”

“... opinion, his is the best, and psychologically the most convincing, account of how a well-educated young American of the 1950s and 1960s could think of himself as a ‘liberal’ and still be a committed Cold Warrior. As he says, ‘whether we had a right – any more than the French before us – to pursue by fire and steel in Indochina the objectives our ...”

“... and real vents can be just as mixed up as fictional ones. When the English entertainer Arthur Prince died in 1948, his jolly partner Jim was interred with him, and they were joined in their grave shortly afterwards by their grieving vent-widow. In the 1950s, an Australian singer who used to appear on stage with her vent-husband Herbert Dexter found ...”

“... as a picture ofa normal little boy wearing shorts but was soon reworked into a full-frontal of a young man with a shock of blond hair and an adult’s chest hair, completely naked except for a pair of girlish Mary Janes on his feet. There’s no way that anyone who knew Warhol could have read the painting as anything other than a brazen self-portrait by an ...”

“... out together, producing the webzine Spiked, setting up media training for teens (Debating Matters, Young Journalists’ Academy, a ‘programme for London state-school pupils who have the passion and the guts, but not “the right contacts”’) and a confusing cloud of other organisations: the Manifesto Club, WorldWrite, Audacity.org, the Modern ...”

“... before a pierglass; we might imagine these objects that once belonged to a beautiful, famous, sad, young woman, can tell us something strange and true about our own lives. The people who queued to see her things around the world were apt to say such a thing. The eternal-seeming fabulousness of a great movie star – like that of a princess – might serve for ...”

“... vanguard of the ascending bourgeoisie, becomes the lumpen-bourgeoisie in the age of its decay,’ Arthur Koestler wrote. Nowhere in Anglo-America is this phenomenon more evident than in the British media, which even at its most reactionary used to maintain some commitment to wit and style. The Spectator, once suavely edited, now serves as a fraternity house ...”

“... quixotic bill to prohibit first use of any nuclear weapon without a congressional declaration.) As Arthur Schlesinger pointed out forty years ago in The Imperial Presidency, Congress ‘almost came to love its impotence’ during the Cold War: ‘The image of the president acting by himself in foreign affairs, imposing his own sense of reality and necessity on ...”

“... In retailer language, you can lower your mark-up but earn more because of the increased volume. Arthur Danto once observed that Andy Warhol had only one idea – roughly, that mass-produced media images could be seen as a form of art – but that what was unique about him was that he fully grasped that idea in every ...”

“... Gustav and Walter and Franz’. How did she do it? At first, at least, she had great beauty. As a young woman, Alma Schindler, Emil’s oldest daughter, was said to be ‘the loveliest girl in Vienna’, with lustrous dark hair and a self-confident gaze. She had her first kiss aged 17 with Gustav Klimt, while travelling in Genoa. Klimt found her beautiful but ...”