“... McLaren and Johnny Rotten – who captured my imagination. What clinched it for me was a profile I read in Melody Maker in June 1979, the third part of ‘The Rise and Fall of Malcolm McLaren’. I’d missed the first two instalments, but it didn’t matter: I read and reread the piece that summer. Sharply written by ...”

“... around, humiliated’, as Ebert put it, upset the critics, though some of their remarks now read like a particular kind of pearl-clutching: how dare she, who has her mother’s face and low voice, look so cheap? But her tawdry turn isn’t great just because it made the nuns in Rome pray for her; it’s great because she seemed to understand, more than ...”

“... his credit) he stumbles several times when he has to broadcast this absurdity. 4 April. Asked to read The Good Companions for a possible production I find I can only get as far as the end of Act I. It’s interesting, though, in that it’s Priestley on one of his favourite themes, that of escape and escape from the North particularly. Act I, Scene I ends ...”

“... the Anglican Bishop of Stepney, Tom Cook, former Deputy Chief Constable of West Yorkshire, and Richard Stone, Chairman of the Jewish Council for Racial Equality. The Lawrences decided that Sir William was an unsuitable chairman, given his record in immigration proceedings. (The Observer also objected to Edmund Lawson, Counsel to the Inquiry, on the grounds ...”

“... love for the common man, but written in such a forbidding way that the common man is unlikely to read it. Well, The Lord of the Rings is the opposite. It is a work written to keep the modern world at bay that the modern world adores. In the late 1990s, Best Book polls conducted for Waterstone’s and Channel Four, the Daily Telegraph, the Folio Society and ...”

“... of the Israeli cause as Elliot Abrams, John Bolton, Douglas Feith, I. Lewis (‘Scooter’) Libby, Richard Perle, Paul Wolfowitz and David Wurmser. As we shall see, these officials have consistently pushed for policies favoured by Israel and backed by organisations in the Lobby. The Lobby doesn’t want an open debate, of course, because that might lead ...”

“... to social reality, and which could only ever be partial. Thus it is a mistake, Mitchell says, to read Freud as just another proponent of patriarchal morality, telling women they would be happy if only they submitted to the dulling pleasures of wifely and maternal duty. Indeed, Freud came increasingly to emphasise the impossibility of the ...”

“... and his great novel, Beltraffio, ‘was a kind of aesthetic war-cry’. His wife, who has never read his great book, engages with him in a sinister struggle for possession of their child. Not only does she cosset him and create neurosis in him – as any parent might – but she attempts to ‘shield’ him from the mysterious laxity of his father’s ...”

“... the improvised rockets was ‘unlikely’ to be more than two kilometres. Postol and a colleague, Richard M. Lloyd, published an analysis two weeks after 21 August in which they correctly assessed that the rockets involved carried a far greater payload of sarin than previously estimated. The Times reported on that analysis at length, describing Postol and ...”

“... was bestowed still the greatest honour that could have come my way.15 February. Good reviews for Richard Wilson’s production of Sarah Kane’s Blasted at Sheffield. In such a violent play, though, I find myself spiked by my literalness (as I remember being by Mark Ravenhill’s Shopping and Fucking). If a character is mutilated on stage, blinded, say, or ...”

“... fronting both magazines at the same time. In June 1974, two months before Watergate drove his boss Richard Nixon from office, Newsweek portrayed Kissinger as ‘Super K’ in full hero outfit, muscles rippling, cape swirling. He knew it was too good to last: those whom the gods wish to destroy they first dress up as Superman. Gewen describes the absurdity of ...”

“... Samuels’. Then Tory rumours reached him of a potential conflict of interest scandal. One way to read it was as a case of insider dealing. The other way was that Marconi had got the contract only because Herbert Samuel was doing a favour to his fellow Jews, who were all in league to rip off the British taxpayer. Naturally, Belloc and Cecil pushed the second ...”

“... and an opportunity which should keep it on the road for the lifetime of everyone likely to read this, and probably far beyond. The agents of the transformation will be, first, the Russian government and its as yet tentative entrepreneurs, and second, the Western businessmen now poking about in Moscow, fascinated, fearful and endlessly ...”

“... that Melanie was to meet Freud’s disciple and colleague, Sandor Ferenczi. In about 1914, she read Freud’s paper on dreams (‘Uber den Traum’), realised that ‘that was what I was aiming at,’ and entered into analysis with Ferenczi. She attended the Fifth Congress of the International Psycho-Analytic Association in Budapest in 1918, and in 1919 ...”

“... words to use and their choices can be idiosyncratic. After a patient is discharged the notes are read, often with some difficulty, by a ‘clinical coder’, a relatively low-paid member of the hospital administration whose job it is to match the doctor’s narrative against two lists of standard terms, the World Health Organisation’s International ...”