“... With Making It, Podhoretz was stepping up into Mailer’s heavyweight division, only to get KO’d by the champ himself – sucker-punched. Mailer read the book in galley and told Podhoretz he liked it. It was Podhoretz’s hope after the volley of abuse from nearly every quarter that Mailer would ride to the cavalry rescue. But when Mailer’s essay on ...”

“... and my favourite, ‘old Malc’, the composer Malcolm Arnold. (Did anyone call him that in his own lifetime?) Sometimes you have a clue: ‘Who say “cordiality responsible for such uncongeniality”? (Psst! Paul Klee.)’ Then, if you are reading with the kind of attention a poet ‘ought to be able to ...”

“... Terrorist was forced to compromise his principles to save his long-lost illegitimate son. But William Howarth’s essay shows that Robespierre has not been entirely ill-wished by the theatre. An 1888 play by Combet has a memorable stage direction. ‘Then Robespierre appears, borne on clouds. At his entry, the heavenly choir bursts into ...”

“... Court judge, promised an ‘open and fearless’ investigation. In 2013 the foreign secretary, William Hague, made an application for ‘public interest immunity’ – which meant that the government’s classified files on Litvinenko wouldn’t be available to the inquest and that Owen’s freedom to investigate was severely restricted. ‘The British ...”

“... heavenly cricket team. Greene on cinema, Osbert Lancaster on art, Elizabeth Bowen on theatre, William Empson on travel ... and Evelyn Waugh on books. Waugh’s lambasting of the milquetoast Left sounds like mere common sense now, but by making truthfulness of prose his first criterion he achieved a permanently refreshing generosity of taste. With poetry ...”

“... that no spy ever told his masters anything of value they could not have gleaned from the press? Or Malcolm Muggeridge’s chronicles of his wasted time in the farce of paying agents in Lorenço Marques during the war? Perhaps Cyril Connolly said the last word on the spy story when in ‘Bond strikes camp’ he pictured 007 being nearly seduced by a C ...”

“... and legal right, racial injustice rose to fever pitch during the 1960s. The third and deadliest Ku Klux Klan (succeeding the Southern Klan of the late 1860s and the national Klan of the 1920s) dynamited churches where members of the black freedom struggle met. Klansmen beat and murdered civil rights workers and Southern blacks who tried to register to ...”

“... Medicine is the harbinger of secularisation. ‘I lift up mine eyes unto the pill,’ as Malcolm Muggeridge said archly; the Mayo Clinic, Porter in turn suggests, is one of the ‘cathedrals of the new medical science’: an almost too perfect exemplar of the metaphysical debilities of our time. We want more and more of what it seems to offer and are ...”

“... of reading the memoir of his friend Christopher Buckley, son of the conservative commentator William Buckley. Hitchens discovers a line he particularly likes, about ‘bringing to life a circuit that will spare the republic’, but is horrified to realise that it comes from the address of his arch-nemesis, Henry Kissinger, at Buckley’s memorial ...”

“... of sport and invited Theresa back to team up with him against Bobby Charlton and Malcolm Turnbull, another ambitious student, now prime minister of Australia.May’s Oxford wasn’t Cameron’s. She went to church every Sunday. She didn’t drink much, and in any case couldn’t afford to. Her idea of a good time was to watch The ...”

“... suggest that literature acts as one of these, but the recent republication of influential books by Malcolm Evans and Jonathan Dollimore† confirms a developing and converging set of concerns with the possibilities, the subtleties and the crudities of the process he spotlights. Although Evans’s Signifying nothing, a virtuoso performance of startling ...”

“... finished novel, Troubles, which took shape rapidly and was published in 1970, winning praise from William Trevor and Elizabeth Bowen. ‘If I had bothered to look at [my] diary,’ he noted two months after its publication, ‘I wd also have used the “flight of stone steps leading up into thin air”, which I simply forgot.’ He had added a detail to his ...”

“... you may fight a hundred battles and not lose one. Sun Tzu, The Art of War, c.450 BC The historian William Manchester, who served with him in the Pacific, said he was the greatest soldier in American history. Never much regarded in Britain, he is still recalled with loathing in Australia. When Americans remember him, it is with something close to ...”

“... boy, was aimed at my life like a loaded pistol.’ One of his best friends in his twenties was Malcolm Cowley, through whom he had briefly met Hart Crane. Cowley’s wife had been on the ship with Crane when he committed suicide in 1932. A homosexual lifestyle, Cowley had warned Cheever, ‘could only end with drunkenness and ghastly suicide’. As one of ...”

“... remain seem to be infested with moles. The business schools have been covering the ground with Malcolm Bradbury, Martin Wiener and Correlli Barnett. Their audit of the nation is complete. Confirming old suspicions about the degeneracy of the sociology department, it has also brought out a newer truth about English culture and its responsibility for the ...”