“... that Jewish writer who slept in a room lined with cork and wrote the famous book I could never read. You know, Marcel something . . . Nebbishy looking. He smelt of mothballs, wore a fur coat down to the ground, asked heaps about make-up. Would a duchess use rouge? Did demi-mondaines put kohl on their eyes? How should I know? But then, how could I have ...”

“... the truth if a lie would serve him just as well’. Even his closest associates found him hard to read. ‘You keep your cards close up against your belly,’ his interior secretary, Harold Ickes, complained. ‘You never put them on the table.’ Roosevelt played off one adviser against another as a matter of course. ‘Never let your left hand know what ...”

“... of the Learned Elders of Zion to serve the British Empire. (Some of them, like Churchill, read and recommended the Protocols, until the Times exposed it as a fake.) The British Ambassador in Constantinople reported that Jews were behind the revolution of the Young Turks of 1908, a complete nonsense. ‘I do not think it is easy to exaggerate the ...”

“... like himself. Judith Mackrell suspects that Lydia Lopokova was being mischievous when she chose to read ‘The Red Shoes’ on the wireless for the BBC in 1935. Lopokova was a born show-off but she never sold her soul to the dance. She was unusually free of ‘the psychological perils of her vocation’: ‘masochism, obsession and narcissism’. In fact she ...”

“... post-9/11 journal Standpoint, somewhere to the right of the ‘new’ British centre.But to read back through his pieces for the paper, and the reviews of his books, among them a glowing piece by Paul Foot in 1986, is to know that he isn’t easily pinned down. Yet if there were laws against inciting party political hatred, Johnson would have been fined ...”

“... that came before him. And BBC managers are unsackable. In the recent judgment on the Cliff Richard case, besides criticising the rationale behind broadcasting the story in the first place (which, typically enough, was in part to avoid criticism for not broadcasting it), the judge found that the UK news editor was not a reliable witness and that the ...”

“... know of the man for whom their school is named. The Columbia undergraduates up the street, who read W.E.B. Du Bois’s The Souls of Black Folk in the Plato-to-Arendt ‘great books’ course mandatory for all sophomores, have probably never heard of the man who was, in the 1930s, one of Du Bois’s crucial collaborators as well as one of his sharpest ...”

“... was launched in 2017 ‘to challenge herd mentality wherever we see it’. At first the website read like a more sedate version of the Telegraph’s opinion pages and struggled to make an impact. But since 2019, when ConservativeHome founder Tim Montgomerie was replaced as editor and Freddie Sayers joined as executive editor (he is now editor-in-chief and ...”

“... according to which she should weigh between 125 and 165 pounds. Is anybody making us read these magazines: the same magazines, by the way, which order us to be constantly reaching orgasm? (No word on that from the surgeon general’s office.) But is living in a culture that produces fashion magazines really a source of unprecedented misery? In ...”

“... is late for the scholarship pupil plot in Britain and Ireland. John McGahern, Edna O’Brien, Richard Hoggart, Raymond Williams: they were all born between the end of the First World War and the early 1930s, and published their stories of class alienation in the late 1950s and early 1960s. It’s a bit late, too, for the middle-class unmarried motherhood ...”

“... a TV crew reassured us that we were still in the real world. The tall, London-based CNN presenter Richard Quest, in tailored trenchcoat, waited impressively for his gear. CNN was here for some really significant story – the marriage of Sir Paul McCartney and anti-landmine campaigner Heather Mills, perhaps; a shade less probably, the wedding in St Eugene’s ...”

“... slow swing replaced by a nocturne. The station cut in again with a learned authority, ‘Professor Richard Pierson, famous astronomer’, direct from the Princeton observatory to explain the discharge and point out that Mars could not support intelligent life. Pierson, however, confessed that he could not explain the regularity of the emissions. More ...”

“... studying socialism; fired by Henry George, he was instructed mainly by Marx, whom he actually read (in French). Soon he was an indispensable Fabian. He worked like the devil – it is quite a relief to find him talking about his ‘inveterate laziness’, and to learn that on some days he ‘did practically nothing’. But on such days he must have been ...”

“... been all the more impressive. This is the biggest exercise in political rehabilitation since Richard Nixon – with worthier results, it is to be hoped. It has not happened because of any random stroke of luck but, as we have seen, because Jenkins’s course has had a clear rationale. He has had luck, of course, but mainly the sort of luck that ...”

“... to meet Roosevelt and his entourage, they often asked Professor Denis Brogan what they should read in preparation. They expected to be recommended some work on American politics, but Brogan always suggested the memoirs of Saint-Simon. Roosevelt ran a court, and the danger of a court is that the ego of the monarch will be inflated by the adulation of those ...”