“... Organisation of Apocryphal Power, run by a fiendish translator named Ermes Marana, whose purpose may or may not be the subversion of fiction itself. The OAP is vaguely reminiscent of Thomas Pynchon’s underground postal service, the Tristero System, and almost certainly has covert links with Buñuel’s Revolutionary Army ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... into its wealth leaves the field wide open for journalistic speculation. The British people may feel they have a ‘right to be informed’: but that right has been consistently disregarded, and the ‘authentic information’ has been deliberately withheld. Yet it is not only the lack of hard data about the extent of the royal fortune which is ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”