“... and worshipped by his friends; James was 41, known mainly for The Portrait of a Lady and Daisy Miller, examples of the ‘international theme’ he’d mined with such singularity. He was a solitary figure, an arch-stylist who appeared to live as a ghost in the varnished rooms of his own sensibility. ‘Singleness consorts much better with my whole view of ...”

“... Kafka (the first English translation of ‘Metamorphosis’, again by Jolas), Michel Leiris, Henry Miller, Anaïs Nin, Herbert Read, Soupault and Jolas himself. Glancing through its faded and disintegrating back issues or reading Dougald McMillan’s transition: The History of a Literary Era 1927-38 (1975), one finds an astonishing compendium of the most ...”

“... of continued close relations with the Americans. In February the CIA honoured him with the George Tenet medal, in recognition of his ‘excellent intelligence performance in the domain of counterterrorism and his unbounded contribution to realise world security and peace’. On the night of 20 June, the eve of the Eid al-Fitr festival that ends the ...”

“... illness’ and quotes this entry: ‘went berrying, done some shoes, scot to breakfast and dinner George went away today but O dear what a life to live God help me to do my duty baked 5 pies drove cow.’ And could Carlyle have approved of the ocean-haul seine fishermen of Long Island whose way of life was being extinguished in the mid-1980s, just as Peter ...”

“... and, of course, Peter Ackroyd’s gold-brick biography of Blake. Bennett, Ackroyd and Jonathan Miller – these were the figures who mattered most. The Christmas parcels of English literature. Enough of threadbare bohemia, paranoid narcissism, chemical tourism through the Third World. Enough of ill-disciplined prose and rootless lives. Enough of midnight ...”

“... was signed in October 1994. The Republican Right railed against this for the next six years, until George W. Bush brought a host of the Agreement’s critics into his Administration, and they set about dismantling it, thus fulfilling their own prophecy and initiating another dangerous confrontation with Pyongyang. The same folks who brought us the invasion of ...”

“... was probably acquired from a Cockney immigration officer), he was a subject of King George V, and therefore, as he spent a lifetime explaining to interviewers, not a refugee. ‘After the excitements of Berlin, Britain was inevitably a comedown,’ Hobsbawm remembered. ‘Nothing in London had the emotional charge of those ...”

“... scratch round-up of whoever’s available and an exercise we went through both with The Madness of George III and The Lady in the Van partly to find out how long the play is likely to be and also to get some notion of what it’s about. And it is helpful, though painful and embarrassing too as some sections are far from finished, the characters scarcely ...”

“... modest at best, narrow-minded at worst: the echoes here are from the political theorist David Miller. The latter envisages a kind of global ethics, ambitious and unwieldy: the echoes here are from Michael Dummett and Onora O’Neill and might be dismissed as utopian, were it not for the fact that human movement across borders is set to continue, with or ...”

“... causes were discovered in the early Nineties – after the obscure upstate New York doctor, George Sumner Huntington, who specified its symptoms in 1872; Parkinson (James) got his tremor in 1817 and soon thereafter the great anatomist Charles Bell, whom Darwin admired, could be even more precise about ‘his’ disorder – Bell’s palsy – of the ...”

“... having assured Elena that anyone who finds her novel risqué is an idiot who hasn’t read Henry Miller, gets drunk and assaults her in a lift. Meanwhile, Elena’s university friends are too caught up in workers’ rights to take her novel seriously. As one classmate puts it, ‘You did everything possible, right? But this, objectively, is not the moment ...”

“... jerks’, joining notorious loudmouths of the era such as the New York Yankees’ bullying owner George Steinbrenner (another Roy Cohn client). From the Bronx to the Battery, opinion on Trump set as hard as the cement on his construction sites and as fast as he had ordered underpaid Polish immigrant construction workers in 1980 to jackhammer the Art Deco ...”

“... secretary of education; Jeane Kirkpatrick, the former UN ambassador; and the influential columnist George Will are also steadfast supporters. The US form of government offers activists many ways of influencing the policy process. Interest groups can lobby elected representatives and members of the executive branch, make campaign contributions, vote in ...”

“... Mobutu’s self-promotion via the Rumble in the Jungle, the 1974 heavyweight title fight between George Foreman and Muhammad Ali in Kinshasa. Mobuto, who was always more interested in football’s potential to enhance his regime, trumpeted the fact that Zaire was the first Black African nation to qualify for a World Cup, and even helped design their kit. But ...”

“... Beulah, bring me my Jicky, then peel me a grape. After the Second World War, the photographer Lee Miller, Man Ray’s former model, mistress and protégée, became a close friend, as did Ivy Compton-Burnett. The often forbidding Ivy, she of the frightening pinned-up hairstyle, rusty suits and morbid-spinster ways, whose decades-long relationship with the ...”