“... biggest of the changes he introduced to aid prisoner rehabilitation: inmates were encouraged to read and write. For Herman Spector, the prison’s librarian, the programme became a pet project: in 1957, when 18 per cent of the American public used a library, Spector produced a report to show that 90 per cent of San Quentin’s prisoners were borrowing ...”

“... into more than half its carrier’s offspring, will spread. These genes are not merely selfish in Richard Dawkins’s sense of being selected to out-compete different versions of themselves in the population: they are ruthless because, as in the case of Medea, they can spread even though their effects are strongly detrimental to the evolutionary interests of ...”

“... and by 1953 had established a reputation as a biographer. Two volumes on the life of Richard Monckton-Milnes, the late Georgian politician and socialite, were followed by a life of Monckton-Milnes’s son, Lord Crewe. The latter was the quid pro quo for access to the archives and was, Pope-Hennessy admitted, ‘less than inspired’. Its ...”

“... of the Sierra Maestra. It was also the place where Castro, who worshipped Martí’s verses and read Gabriel García Márquez’s first drafts, wrote his own poetry. In the early years he still had to explain his revolution to the world – and to himself – and to defend its shifting agenda against a relentless counter-narrative spun out of ...”

“... but while panels are allowed to look at metrics, for the time being they are still expected to read the submitted papers. Citation counts are the best measure of research strength at a large scale – an entire country’s output, say – but they are at best an indirect indicator of quality in individual papers, and they come with all sorts of biases ...”

“... to build careers on the blacklist. The virus that would surface decades later, disguised as Richard Nixon or Ronald Reagan, began here. Fault lines in the American psyche are most obvious at the interface of showbiz saccharine and the political process: Monroe’s birthday tribute to JFK, Sinatra as MC at the Kennedy White House, late-liberal ...”

“... the mystery and miracle of his existence. In his excellent book on the Russian Revolutionary novel Richard Freeborn discusses the many forerunners of Dr Zhivago, and implies, what is certainly the case, that the novels which had sought to come to terms with the new world of the Revolution – Fedin’s Cities and Years, Veresaev’s The Deadlock, Bulgakov’s ...”

“... His grandfather, Thomas Blair, was a clergyman, not to be confused with the Rev. Blair of Richard Ingrams’s satiric imagination. (It is odd, incidentally, to read books which so regularly couple together the words ‘Blair’ – Orwell’s real name – and ‘socialism’.) But further back there was an ...”

“... and spoke of Wollstonecraft’s ‘imperfect heroism’, as Todd has it, she was annoyed; and when Richard Cobb’s review of that work subsequently appeared using the occasion to charge Wollstonecraft with silliness, egotism, envy, rancour, meddling, mediocrity and bad writing, she was furious. Describing these events a few years ago in Gender, Art and ...”

“... and mental frailty that had persuaded the British Home Secretary to discharge him. Guzmán, having read the reports from the UK with a critical eye, bespoke fresh ones. They satisfied him that, whatever the penalty might turn out to be, the Senator was fit to stand trial. Pinochet appealed against this decision. Last summer, after an inexplicably long ...”

“... of scooter-borne rock fans, draped in the ambiguous insignia of RAF targets and Union Jacks. What Richard Weight calls the ‘very British style’ of Mod found its initial foothold in late 1950s Soho with the arrival of the jazz ‘modernists’, who defined themselves in strict opposition to the reigning gatekeepers of Trad. Modernists were wilfully ...”

“... Twomblys, accidental Jackson Pollocks, accidental works by Eva Hesse or Louise Bourgeois or Richard Tuttle or Jean-Michel Basquiat. (See recent coup to the right: an accidental Philip Guston. Guston’s 1968 painting Boot is above, and below a CE artist’s picture, now in my collection, of an eight-fingered glove.) At such moments, you not only feel ...”

“... CIA. The Senate had convened an inquiry into CIA misconduct, and even the fanatical cold warrior Richard Nixon had promoted détente with the Soviet Union and opened a diplomatic door to China. One could be pardoned for hoping that a reorientation of policy was underway.But almost as soon as the last helicopter left the roof of the American Embassy in ...”

“... been invited to come to Moscow to attend the celebrations of his centenary. I’m a guest here to read his poetry and I shall read a poem which he kept only in manuscript in which he talks about his time being without wings, uninspired time. So this is full of the ironies of change. Fortunately, the BBC do not use an ...”

“... appetite alive. If James’s novels don’t make interest in the reader come alive they won’t read on, they won’t buy them. The writer’s appetite has to incite the readers appetite. Psychoanalytic theory – in all its various versions – is a set of stories about this process of transformation that James calls Art (with a capital A) and we can call ...”