“... Cyber-warfare was now assumed to pose a greater threat to national security than terrorism. In May 2014, the attorney general, Eric Holder, announced that criminal charges had been laid against five Chinese military officials accused of hacking into US companies in order to gain trade secrets. In October 2014, as President Obama was preparing to make a ...”

“... secretary) to Peggy Guggenheim – as well as Edwin and Willa Muir, Ford Madox Ford and Ernest Hemingway. She crops up in everyone’s memoirs, and seems to have been very close to Guggenheim, but she wasn’t just a hanger-on, and played a significant part in getting Barnes’s Nightwood into print. She fell in love and had affairs, mostly, but not ...”

“... Barely six months after the outbreak of the First World War, on Christmas Day 1914, Freud wrote to Ernest Jones to lament that the psychoanalytic movement ‘is now perishing in the strife of nations’ (the two men were on opposite sides in the war). ‘I do not delude myself,’ he wrote. ‘The springtime of our science has abruptly broken off … all we ...”

“... should be thought of not as a man but as a madman. We are in the sphere of the alienist. In 1931 Ernest Jones wrote of the witchcraft epidemic and the persecution of witches: ‘The behaviour of the Church in ascribing all manner of unworthy traits to women, and even debating whether she [sic] had a soul at all or was merely a beast, was without question due ...”

“... surely Attlee’s most important speech, after Chamberlain, deserted by ninety of his own MPs in May 1940, appealed to Attlee to join him in a national government. Attlee’s reply (‘Prime minister, our party won’t have you and I think I am right in saying that the country won’t have you either’) was what made Churchill prime minister – as fateful ...”

“... Melanie Klein, bereft of intellectual support in Berlin after the death of Karl Abraham, accepted Ernest Jones’s invitation (mediated by Alix Strachey) and settled in London, where her ideas gained a sympathetic hearing. When in 1927 Anna Freud published a book on child analysis, it was sharply criticised by Klein, whose doubts were shared by other London ...”

“... nature totally outstripped art. Could any mere novelist – Anthony Trollope, Hugh Walpole, even Ernest Raymond – conceivably have come up with a plot in which a highly-regarded, if disappointed, Oxford don first mixes an explosive cocktail to be drunk by his own Church, on being taxed with it denies all responsibility for his action, then in fear of ...”

“... the left critics that the NUM was putting flesh on bones set in place by them. If the mineworkers may be described as ‘lions led by donkeys’ (in Eric Hammond’s typically emollient phrase to the Labour Party Conference in October), then the donkeys could as well retort that they at least led, and that those carping from a position well behind them were ...”

“... in the Wood crave the rainy, stained and soggy. Yet the later Murdoch was a hard-line Tory, who may well have been liberal in her aesthetics but was hardly so in her politics. She had right-wing views on most topics, and lambasted the work of Derrida while having only the flimsiest notion of what it was about. Not much warm-hearted jumble there. On the ...”

“... his letters – the aim being to purge all Communists from the organisation. The trouble was that Ernest Bevin had publicly accused the Delegacy of fomenting industrial strife at the car plant in Cowley, the university had panicked and, in league with the usual Cold Warriors, set about ‘reforming’ the Delegacy. Pickstock recalled with particular pleasure ...”

“... Davis remembers him telling her that he used to get nervous before delivering them. Part of it may have been to do with the methodical patience he learned during his two years in the mountain fastness of the Sierra Maestra. It was also the place where Castro, who worshipped Martí’s verses and read Gabriel García Márquez’s first drafts, wrote his own ...”

“... a first in PPE. He there began a research degree in Hegel’s philosophy of history. Hegelian he may have been by choice, but he was at Oxford during the postwar glory days of ordinary language philosophy. That shows wonderfully in the correspondence. Life was not easy on him. He was for many years a Communist, not so terrible a thing in those days for an ...”

“... that their spouses will be in the grip of a powerful obsession which they cannot share and which may drive these spouses to their laboratories even on Christmas morning. The passage reminded me of Odile Crick’s complaints about her husband’s prolonged periods of in explicable broodiness. On the question of racism, Medawar reflects on the remarkable ...”

“... rhythms of which Grainger drew on many times. His preference for short forms and free scoring may be linked to the drawing-room ballad and the ‘vulgar’ instruments of the concert hall: but Josephson forgets to say that he may have exploited this, too, as an alibi to conceal the fact that he never bothered to master ...”

“... Vietnam’s future rather than preserve its past. It is quite likely that as a journalist, one may want for sensitivity about intruding on grief; it is possible that as a foreigner in Vietnam, one may intrude on it without knowing it: while Four Hours in My Lai is ostensibly an inquiry into the massacre of up to four ...”