“... be back around six, in plenty of time to change for the Balfour-Pauls’ party.’ Glen Balfour-Paul was first secretary at the embassy and apparently unaware that anything was going on. It would be logical to assume that MI6 were keeping the flat on rue Kantari under constant surveillance. Perhaps someone remarkably incompetent was monitoring his ...”

“... decline in his sexual up-for-it-ness. From the Hotel Cipriani he writes to tell his boyfriend Paul Anstee about taking in the sights: ‘Another visit to the likely beach made me witness to a quite interesting gangbang in which the principal performers were Patrick (and equipage, rather to my surprise) and a German of remarkable handsomeness and Royal ...”

“... tank. But the moment that Sarah Palin stepped up to the mike at the Republican Convention in St Paul, and began talking in her homely, mezzo-soprano, Far Western twang, she showed herself to be incontestably the real thing. Americans, starved of völkisch authenticity in their national politicians, thrilled to her presence on the stage. Forty million people ...”

“... Union flag mask, Park View recently hosted a visit from the Royal College of Defence Studies and a Harry Potter Trivia Evening; it had a Christmas card competition, and one girl was picked to meet Prince William. The school leadership is new, the trust that oversees the running of the school has a new name and the school itself will shortly get a new name ...”

“... Seventy-four years ago a viral pandemic began in America, most likely on a pig farm in Iowa. Fifteen months later it had killed over eighteen million people, 1 per cent of the world’s population, as many as died in two world wars, almost ten times as many as have died in a decade of Aids. The virus, transmitted by airborne mucus and saliva, spread via coughs and sneezes ...”

“... not only Eddie Cantor, George Burns, George Jessel and Sophie Tucker, but the future movie mogul Harry Cohn, the young Walter Winchell and his own older brother. Signed by the Shubert Brothers in 1911, Jolson was the first product of the bastard forms of vaudeville and minstrel show to be legitimised on Broadway’s Great White Way, where he addressed his ...”

“... tags the metaphor: violence expressed by choice of wardrobe. He describes his street-wise ponce, Harry Fabian. ‘He dressed far too well. There was a quality of savagery about his clothes – hatred in the relentless grip of his collar, malice in the vicious little knot of his tie, defiant acquisitiveness in the skin-tight fit of his coat.’ Published ...”

“... Throughout his career Kennan remained sceptical of universalist commitments, beginning with Harry Truman’s promise in 1947 to protect ‘free peoples’ everywhere from the threat of ‘subjugation’. But realism in foreign policy had different meanings at different times. Throughout the 1950s and 1960s, realism signalled a willingness to use ...”

“... here is to say that the form of expression is somehow integral to the content. For instance, when Paul Robert Cohen was arraigned for wearing a jacket embroidered with the slogan ‘Fuck the draft’ during the Vietnam War, it was the words used that were deemed objectionable; Cohen would have had no trouble if the jacket had said ‘I find conscription ...”

“... in pain. Even with a brief book, I was coming up about 40,000 words short. I asked to review Paul Chaloner’s lively and informative This Is Esports because I’d been brooding on these questions during lockdown.* My idea was that by thinking about the emerging field of digital sports, I’d find an interesting story and also clarify my thinking about ...”

“... change, resource depletion, the future of the planet and so on, which is more or less exactly what Paul Crutzen and Eugene F. Stoermer hoped would happen when they first proposed it in the Global Change Newsletter in 2000. Crutzen is an atmospheric chemist; Stoermer, who died in 2012, was a freshwater ecologist. The nature of their work caused them to ...”

“... from London in my hands, I spent a long time pondering the implications. For almost fifteen years Paul Hill, Gerry Conlon, Paddy Armstrong and Carole Richardson had insisted they were innocent and had been framed by the police. I recalled that Sir Michael Havers, who led for the Crown in the 1975 trial, had reasoned to the jury that if the Four were ...”

“... of stories in Limits and Renewals, has been demonstrated by the young doyen of Kipling studies, Harry Ricketts, who, like Mrs Bathurst herself, lives and works in New Zealand. Charles Allen, whose great-grandfather brought the 16-year-old Kipling out to Lahore to work on the Civil and Military Gazette, has made a good selection of the Indian ...”

“... on the character of the hoaxer and the trickster – Cagliostro, Cesare Borgia, the Great Orsino, Harry Lime, Mr Arkadin, Hank Quinlan. Quite often he is a magician, on screen as well as off. In F for Fake, he provides both critique and demonstration of forgery in action, the nature of illusion, the twinning of lies and truth, the original and the copy. He ...”

“... be exceedingly fond of you & want your company very much & at the same time wish to go to bed with Harry occasionally.’ Tony Pirie seems not to have shared Lettice’s sangfroid: she was married, and ‘got into panics’ about her husband. Julian had some notion of enticing her away and marrying her himself (‘she’s the best of my young women so far, but ...”