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“... After the fall of Batista in 1959, the poet Heberto Padilla, then 27 and living in New York, returned elatedly to Havana, joining the staff of the paper Revolucion. Thus helping to create the god who would later fail him. In 1961 the First Congress of Cuban Writers and Artists was held, its motto being ‘To Defend the Revolution is to Defend Culture’; simultaneously, Padilla says, it became clear that membership of the new Writers’ Union was to depend on approval by the National Board of Culture, a body designed to prevent any repetition of the Pasternak affair ...”

“... When, in May, Alexander Boris de Pfeffel Johnson gives up his role as Tory MP for the Spectator to take over from Michael Heseltine as the editor of Henley-on-Thames, you have to wonder where they’re going to find someone sufficiently blond to be his successor at Doughty Street (from which sturdy address the organ Johnson currently oversees emerges each week ...”

“... who was he and what did he do? Newspaper interviews with Archer offer a choice. According to Terry Coleman in the Guardian of 21 July 1973, Archer senior served ‘in the Royal Engineers and then in the diplomatic service, and was once British consul in Singapore’. According to the International Herald Tribune of 4 May 1980, he was ‘an army officer who ...”

“... mentions hats, kites, lanterns, fans, money, umbrellas – and for much of its history, as D.C. Coleman describes in The British Paper Industry, 1495-1860 (1958), wrapping was paper’s primary function. In the 17th century printers used paper to fill their workshop windows: it kept the heat in during winter, and direct sunlight off the printed sheets in ...”

“... a few evenings last summer. An actual occurrence then, but also, as Adams and his librettist Alice Coleman understood, a brightly lit performance with carefully staged arias as well as often repeated choruses and, as Nixon never forgot, a vast audience of television viewers in America. Having successfully launched the show that Nixon himself would shortly call ...”

“... aren’t ‘good characters’ in the sense that you might use the term of Merry Levov, say, or Alexander Portnoy, or Maureen Tarnopol – they’re not vivid or specific, they don’t possess intriguing motivations, they don’t say anything particularly interesting, they’re not very likeable or dislikeable – but in their non-specificness there’s ...”

“... fancied a coffee. I haven’t heard from him since.Earlier this year the young German journalist Alexander Eydlin wrote an article for Die Zeit about how he became a conspiracy theorist, and how he stopped being one. The latest survey by the Friedrich Ebert Foundation suggests that in Germany, as in Britain, as in the US, about half the population tends to ...”

“... collection, mainly of blacks (including Ellington, Louis Armstrong, Fletcher Henderson, Art Tatum, Coleman Hawkins and Cab Calloway). Unlike his friend Léger, who merely adapted ethnological textbook drawings for his ‘primitive’ stage designs, Brancusi had finally internalised it all, had become an African, if you will, at the age of 62 – a tribe of ...”

“... stylings could only sedate the rumblings for so long, and then, as if fired from a cannon, came Alexander Portnoy wagging his dingdong and marauding for shiksas.The tremendous, scandalous success of Portnoy’s Complaint (1969), that pyrotechnical display of flying ejaculate, stopped-up bowels, Jewish angst and mother-woe, revived and inflamed accusations ...”