“... Greenwich Village, and through one of the actresses there met and began taking classes with Allan Miller, a disciple of Lee Strasberg. She auditioned for Strasberg’s Actors Studio aged sixteen, and though she didn’t get in they encouraged her to try again later; piqued, she never did. When she left school in January 1960, she had her first role ...”

“... door (salad of lettuce, beetroot, tomato and brown bread spread with olive paste) when Jonathan Miller passes en route for rehearsals at Covent Garden. He asks me what I’m reading. It’s actually re-rereading and telling him he would hate every page I show him James Lees-Milne’s Through Wood and Dale. I ask him what he is reading and he shows me The ...”

“... with Coltrane, Kendrick Lamar and Beyoncé as with Trump, J.D. Vance, Pete Hegseth and Stephen Miller. Like Beauvoir and James, they know that another country exists in America, one that’s immediately evident when you walk into a bookshop in Paris, Berlin or Madrid stocked with translations of Baldwin, Audre Lorde, bell hooks, ...”

“... mistress of General John Pershing and had helped break up the marriage of the British admiral Sir David Beattie. She was introduced to the glamorous young Superintendent. It was, in Perret’s view, a case of mutual and instantaneous lust. Others diagnosed the meshing of public images. The New York Times report of their wedding, on St Valentine’s Day ...”

“... Macleod, who was off fishing in Scotland during the crucial experiments, did.) Or penicillin. Anne Miller, the first patient to be saved by the antibiotic, died on 27 May this year at the age of 90. Her hospital chart from 1942, showing the dramatic break in her life-threatening fever, is preserved in the Smithsonian. Insofar as medicine heals, it started ...”

“... traces, like the whiff of cordite long after the gun has been fired. When I mention this to David Cornwell/John le Carré, he says: ‘I can still feel it in my nostrils now.’ Historians, like spooks, need a sensitive nose, Orwell’s ‘Sniff, sniff’ for the detection of ‘all the smelly little orthodoxies which are now contending for our ...”

“... Dante, Boccaccio, More, Machiavelli, Montaigne, Hobbes, Bayle, Voltaire, Sterne, Diderot, David, Stendhal, Flaubert, Tolstoy, Warburg, Proust, Kracauer, Picasso and many more, each an extraordinary display of learning. No other living historian approaches the range of this erudition. Every page of Threads and Traces, his latest work to appear in ...”

“... too slow and polite to speak up … the couple are coming to supper this week.’ The couple was David and Assia Wevill. In September they moved and began furnishing their fourth home in as many years. It turned cold, another record-breaking winter, and it was months until they could afford carpets. ‘I am dying for a Bendix!’ Sylvia wrote to her ...”

“... but was forever, you were close to it and it to you … Oh, she hated and loved in a breath!’For David Craig in the early 1970s, Sunset Song was one of a ‘cluster’ of ‘absolutely outstanding … novels of peasant crisis’ published in the 1930s, with Sholokhov his index, plus Steinbeck, plus Silone: ‘It has a wholeness … based on the rhythm of ...”

“... of salvation. He had concocted a bizarre and idiosyncratic theology, rather like the wonderful Miller in The Cheese and the Worms, but in his case it was marshland, and particularly the reeds, which played the central part. The reed is one of the symbols of the Passion, for, on the Cross, Christ had been tendered a vinegar-soaked sponge on the end of a ...”

“... stage, I had been dragged in as a possible editor of this thing.I know they wanted to get Karl Miller at one point.But Karl had recommended me and for Karl’s sake I agreed to talk. It was thought I knew how to start magazines.Irony.Anyway, by then I’d been at the TLS, so I did know more about it than they did. I drew up endless documents about how this ...”

“... rooms); the Battle of Santiago (hosts Chile against Italy in 1962, characterised by the BBC’s David Coleman as ‘the most stupid, appalling, disgusting and disgraceful exhibition of football in the history of the game’); die Wasserschlacht (the water battle) of 1974, when West Germany, the hosts, beat Poland on a waterlogged pitch that nullified the ...”