“... in 1906, the cherished only child of highly educated, non-religious Jewish parents. Her father, Paul, was an electrical engineer with an amazing home library – she first read Kant, Arendt told Gaus, at fourteen. The Arendts were socialist fellow-travellers, Hannah’s mother, Martha, in particular. The ‘impressionistic, romantic’ admiration of ...”

“... appreciative of language. The colours were too bright perhaps.7 March. Read and enjoy Edgelands by Paul Farley and Michael Symmons Roberts about the lure of in-between places and the edges of cities and other communities. I feel I was on to this years ago in my play The Old Country, when Hilary, a spy in the Foreign Office, describes the venues where he met ...”

“... adored Barack Obama. His fiction bore witness to the country’s slow corrosion. Updike’s first Harry ‘Rabbit’ Angstrom novel, Rabbit, Run (1960), is a study of youthful promise and energy ineluctably going to seed. It engendered a tetralogy, the Raj Quartet of American torpor. The second stop on the cabbage trail, Rabbit Redux (1971), is a vivid and ...”

“... about it all, taking shooting classes, learning how to be fast on the draw, the lot. In Dirty Harry, Villiers said, Clint Eastwood says this is the most powerful handgun in the world so I reckon, OK, they got my brother but they’re sure as hell not getting me. But we thought your sister-in-law did it, we said. Maybe she did, he said. Quite possibly. But ...”

“... It was only when I got to the chapter featuring two people whose work I happen to know and love, Paul Bowles and Jean Genet, that the spell was broken. All of a sudden, this oddfellow’s odyssey didn’t feel quite so whimsical – it felt borderline exploitative, as though she was using these people, or their memory, to make herself look good. Bowles was ...”

“... high as the essay ‘Comedy’s Greatest Era’, with its individual portraits of Chaplin, Keaton, Harry Langdon and Harold Lloyd. What moves Agee most about the silent comedians is their capture of a chivalry and a gentleness amazingly suited to the rhythms of modern life: In A Night Out Chaplin, passed out, is hauled along the sidewalk by the scruff of his ...”

“... he talked mostly to him, but Princess Margaret didn’t confine herself to John Gielgud and Paul Eddington but to her credit wanted to meet the boys in the play, which she did, though I suspect most of them had no idea who she was. In 1984 Snowdon took pictures of me for (I think) the Sunday Times after the shooting of A Private Function, the most ...”

“... facts’ are paramilitary crimes, from armed robberies to punishment beatings. Harry McCartan, a serial joy-rider whose ankles the IRA had smashed with hammers 18 months before, was found crucified and semi-conscious on 2 November 2002. He was taken to hospital with his hands still impaled on the fence he had been nailed to. The beating he ...”

“... between carriages began to be replaced with sliding doors. The iconic Underground map, designed by Harry Beck, an electrical draughtsman, in imitation of a circuit diagram (he was paid only ten guineas for his masterwork) was taken up in 1932. By 1937, when the sole Tube line to go deep into South London was renamed the Northern Line, the Underground was, in ...”

“... of childbearing age.In 1968, The Population Bomb, a bestseller written by the Stanford professor Paul Ehrlich and his (uncredited) wife, Anne, predicted that there would soon not be enough food to support the human population and that famines in the 1970s would kill hundreds of millions. The only way to prevent this, they said, was strict birth control ...”

“... Boca Raton, Nantucket and New Hampshire, a $7 million apartment for his first wife, diamonds from Harry Winston and Tiffany’s, and a fleet of fast cars and Harley Davidsons. By August, the Wall Street Journal’s list of more than two dozen major corporations subject to official investigation included such household names as AOL Time Warner, Bristol ...”

“... Frederick the Great, Beyond Soap and Water, as his Nietzschean son was beyond Good and Evil.’ Harry Furniss wrote that ‘Lady Wilde, had she been cleaned up and plainly and rationally dressed, would have made a remarkably fine model of the Grand Dame, but with all her paint and tinsel and tawdry tragedy-queen get-up she was a walking burlesque of ...”

“... Stripes, Charpentier, Delalande, Coney Island Baby, Historic Flamenco, Rusalka, the Bad Plus, Harry Smith’s Anthology of American Folk Music, Son House, Reynaldo Hahn (the real guy, quavering away at the piano!), Busoni’s Bach arrangements, Ginette Neveu, the Stanley Brothers, Tessie O’Shea, Milton Babbitt, The Rough Guide to Rai, Gladys Knight and ...”

“... to prohibit such obnoxious views reaching the Australian public. The minister of communications, Paul Fletcher, obliged by instructing major social media platforms to block all content from Russian state media. This attempted act of censorship – a mirror image of the Russian government’s recent shutting down of Facebook and Twitter – was without ...”