“... his many books, seems to give pride of place to a blockbuster history of the Cold War. Dr John Lewis, editor of the Modern Quarterly, so far from being, as Inglis would have it in one of his punchy characterisations, a ‘hard nut’ of the Communist Party, was an ex-Unitarian minister, much given to moral discourse and retaining a distinctly clerical ...”

“... Trump, it must be said, worked faster than his predecessors when he issued early pardons to I. Lewis Libby (convicted of lying to the FBI to conceal his outing of a CIA agent) and Dinesh D’Souza (convicted of illegal campaign contributions and false statements to the Federal Election Commission). Criminality at the highest levels has been ...”

“... for the illustrated newspapers in the 1880s and 1890s. Lance Calkin, Frank Craig, Samuel Begg, Paul Renouard and others filled the pages of the Illustrated London News, the Graphic and Black and White while continuing to exhibit at the Royal Academy and the Salon. Their newspaper work – its realism and variety of subjects, its experiments with cropping ...”

“... Defence of Vulgarity’. Impurities like these were worth getting into poetry as a kick against St Paul. MacNeice says in Modern Poetry that ‘words like “gold” and “roses” tend to strike me as if written in block capitals.’ The bold, glamorous command of such words in ‘Snow’ is enhanced by judicious contrast with phrases like ‘incorrigibly ...”

“... doctrine and the teachings of Jesus Christ’ and in his sympathy for blacklisted celebrities like Paul Robeson, who ‘got a shitty deal’.) If it were merely a matter of Matthiessen’s reputation as a writer, such explanations might have sufficed, but soon after his arrival in France, he made some new friends, and they started the Paris Review. Since ...”

“... bombs on students ‘returning home at night in evening dress’), was the ‘little band’ of Paul Nizan, René Maheu and Jean-Paul Sartre. Sartre was rumoured to be ‘the worst of the lot’.Beauvoir was preparing for her exams, full of love for Zaza, constantly addressing herself in her diary to the absent Jacques ...”

“... the resemblances and differences between the Empson of The Structure of Complex Words and the Paul de Man of Allegories of Reading – a sign, perhaps, that the most neglected (and most theoretical) of Empson’s books will have something to say even to the young, who may suppose that really serious rhetorical analysis only got going in the late ...”

“... for an avowedly socialist economy, get anything from Milton Friedman – as you could, say, from Paul Samuelson or John Kenneth Galbraith, two US economists who are well-known in reformist circles and the availability of whose work in translation pre-dates Gorbachev. Does Aganbegyan not understand this? Or is he, in the Soviet way, inscribing his support for ...”

“... Steering Group that included . . . Alexander Haig Jr, Max Kampelman, Anthony Lake, Samuel Lewis, Joseph Lieberman, Paul Wolfowitz and Mortimer Zuckerman’. Wolfowitz, Rumsfeld’s Deputy Secretary of Defense, is, along with Perle, best known as an architect of the regime change in Iraq. (‘Regime ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... racketeers. There was Anthony ‘Fat Tony’ Salerno, boss of the Genovese crime family, and Paul ‘Big Paulie’ Castellano, boss of the Gambino crime family, who owned the company that provided the ready-mix cement for Trump Tower, used in place of the usual steel girders. There was John Cody, the boss of Teamsters Local 282, who controlled the cement ...”

“... before?Not a biographer. I’d written studies, including a biographical thing about the poet Alun Lewis years earlier.I remember that: it was the preface of the collection of his stories and poems you edited.Yes, it’s quite a long piece. It took ages and involved the conventional sort of research, going to see his widow and so on. I’d done that many years ...”

“... a group of young intellectuals from different disciplines – it included Cardoso from sociology, Paul Singer from economics, José Artur Giannotti from philosophy, Roberto Schwarz from literature – started a seminar on Capital that became a legend, lasting five years and affecting the atmosphere of the Faculty for ten. When the Armed Forces seized power in ...”

“... the systems of Utrecht and Vienna bears comparison with that of their greatest modern historian, Paul Schroeder, in both the acuity of its repudiation of the balance of power as a nostrum for European peace in the 18th century, and its emphasis on the twin dangers that the statesmen of Vienna sought to conjure: the destructive wars between the powers of ...”

“... and processing houses of Britain.Supermarket strategists have had their eye on local for a while. Paul Kelly, in charge of ‘external affairs and corporate responsibility’ for Asda, told me of a distribution hub in Cumbria that was pouring local produce into one of his stores in Kendal (30 tubs of English Lakes ice cream are sold for every one of Ben ...”