“... films and other media. When Dreyer made his extraordinary film in 1928, and Arthur Honegger and Paul Claudel composed the oratorio Jeanne d’Arc au bûcher ten years later, both were working in the light of modern wars and prejudice. And their works are prophetic: the civil war in 15th-century France presages the treacheries both of the Occupation in ...”

“... subject matter and literary strategy, following the frankly homoerotic early stories of Tennessee Williams.’ Hmm – if you’re following in the footsteps of an earlier writer can you be said to be opening doors? And if Purdy was bold to follow in his wake, how is Williams’s own courage to be assessed?...”

“... It was chaired by Victor Rothschild and its eclectic membership included the philosopher Bernard Williams, the sports commentator David Coleman and the agony aunt Marje Proops. The report they produced two years later was measured, intelligent, elegantly written, slightly agonised and almost wholly ineffectual. The Rothschild Commission accepted that the law ...”

“... enemy nowadays egg-collectors.4 December. To the funeral at St Dunstan’s, Canterbury of John Williams, whom I have known since we were at Oxford and whose character is summed up in an incident during his National Service. Entered for officer selection, he found himself pitted against another candidate on an obstacle course. Arriving at a hanging rope at ...”

“... imaginary had better be called traffic, he quotes, to wonderful effect, a passage of Raymond Williams from The Country and the City: Traffic is not only a technique; it is a form of consciousness and a form of social relations … It is impossible to read the early descriptions of crowded metropolitan streets – the people as isolated atoms, flowing ...”

“... had exhausted the poetic impulse. Nothing was left for us to do.’ The Chicago poet and editor Paul Carroll, born in 1926, wrote: To a young poet the scene in American verse in the late 1940s and early 1950s seemed much like walking down 59th Street in New York for the first time. Elegant and sturdy hotels and apartment buildings stand in the enveloping ...”

“... effectively killing the deal.An auction got underway. The Spectator was sold separately to Paul Marshall, the hedge fund manager who owns the website UnHerd and co-owns the TV channel GB News, for £100 million.† So far the highest bid for the Telegraph – more than £550 million – has come from Dovid Efune, the Manchester-born owner of the New ...”

“... of ‘real journalists, not just celebrity columnists’. The Battle had its big names too: Paul Mason from Newsnight, Suzanne Moore from the Mail on Sunday, the novelist Philip Hensher. Some people refuse to stand on an IoI platform, considering them clandestine and creepy. Others are a bit doubtful, but take part in the events in the interests of free ...”

“... I always felt kindly towards him after learning that he would not stay in the same room as Paul Johnson. 15 March. There is generally a beggar sitting outside the back door of M&S (and likely to be one at the front as well). I will sometimes give them my change as I’m coming out, though I’m irritated at being asked for money as I’m padlocking my ...”

“... in men in question???’ I wrote shriekingly in the margin. A few months​ later she married Paul Suttman, a sculptor so devoted to aesthetics that he told Lucia she was asymmetrical the first time she undressed for him. (She was diagnosed with scoliosis at the age of ten.) He chose forks with only two tines, ‘so it was difficult to eat ...”

“... attribution to Charlotte’s Belgian teacher, Constantin Héger, is laughable: it’s signed ‘Paul Hegér’ (Paul Emmanuel, a character with strong affinities to Héger, is the love-interest in Villette). The date given is 1850; Charlotte left Brussels in 1844. The accent is in the wrong place: Hegér not Héger. It ...”

“... at Home in German Dugouts!’) I’ve got a whole shelf on war artists: C.R.W. Nevinson, Paul Nash, William Roberts, Wyndham Lewis, and the skullishly named Muirhead Bone. I’ve got books about Fabian Ware and the founding of the Commonwealth War Graves Commission. I’ve a 1920 Blue Guide to Belgium and the Western Front and a Michelin Somme guide ...”

“... Wright’s most confessional account of the inner drama of decolonisation. He dedicated it to Eric Williams, the prime minister of Trinidad and author of Capitalism and Slavery, and to the ‘Westernised and tragic elite of Africa, Asia and the West Indians, the lonely outsiders who exist precariously on the cliff-like margins of many cultures’. The ...”

“... sends him a copy of a poem to perk him up. It pays tribute to the American baseball star Ted Williams: ‘Watch the ball and do your thing/This is the moment. Here’s your chance/Don’t let anyone mess with your swing.’ He responds gratefully: ‘Brilliant poem. We need a British version of it.’ Brown hopes this picture is enough to give a sense of ...”

“... sensational trial of tax fraud and conspiracy. His attorney, the no less legendary Edward Bennett Williams (known as ‘the man to see’), was in effect sending him off on a cruise while he played out the appeals procedure. Confronted with this gargoyle of the old gang, many of the Rhodes boys kept a fastidious distance. ‘But Clinton was there,’ in one ...”