“... of his having ‘arrived’. In daydream moments in between the usual author agonising, Podhoretz may have anticipated the publication of Making It as a climactic solo bringing down the curtain on act one of his career and a springboard for his next move. The book was certainly stagecrafted that way. If so, he misjudged the composition of the audience and the ...”

“... he came to regret (his account of this episode has been deleted from the English translation). In May 1969 the Minister transferred him back to the Academy’s Institute of Physics in Moscow where his career had begun, with a modest salary to supplement his Academician’s income. Sakharov describes his scientific work from then on as minor: most of his ...”

“... could have helped discredit a cause larger than himself in much the same way as the wretched Richard Gott recently managed, on a smaller scale, to do), waited until 1982 to publish his book After Long Silence. It told the usual story: the high excitement of the Thirties; the precedence given in Cambridge circles to young men of background and pelf who ...”

“... seemed to be reflected in the angry disarray of contemporary Irish political opinion. Yeats may have wished to avoid conflict with the out-and-out separatists, and to preserve literature from politics, but it turned out that this could not be done, at least by him. He wanted self-government for Ireland, but was sure that more than that was needed if the ...”

“... confounded his public when, after a steady diet of Bach and Beethoven, he turned to composers like Richard Strauss, Sibelius, Grieg and Bizet, praising them to the skies and certainly above the pianistic romantics whom everyone else played. Even with Bach and Mozart, he chose tempi that defied convention and, since he played the same work differently on ...”

“... ministers could offer Foucauldian observers a field-day on the workings of surveillance. Richard Alston, Minister for Communications and the Arts, hounds the ABC for alleged bias – his Jesuit training shows. (Governments never seem to worry about the biases of Kerry Packer’s Channel 9, to take one example.) The funding cuts all but demolished ...”

“... minority sport, but in the late Nineties it suddenly looks like the critical craze of the moment. Richard Wilson, for example, published an article in the TLS a few months ago reviving the claim that the young William Shakespeare can be identified with the actor William Shakeshafte who is named in the will of one of Edmund Campion’s Lancashire Catholic ...”

“... leadership had insisted on the deployment. In 2007 the chief of the general staff, General Richard Dannatt, told the British ambassador to Afghanistan that this decision was a result of the army’s fear of further troop cuts. They believed soldiers who had finished their tours in Iraq would be dismissed if the generals didn’t put them to use ...”

“... technique to imitate “magic picture pad”,’ reads an obscure note from 1970-71. ‘There may be the question of resemblance or substitution (Freud).’ Maybe with a nod to toys like Etch A Sketch, Johns here alludes to the ‘mystic writing pad’ that Freud used to describe how the unconscious operates, the way it retains inscriptions even ...”

“... over in academia Prince is still the party tape of choice. Publishing ‘like it’s 1999’ may be variously interpreted, but whatever the resulting book is called, the assumption is the same: the end of the millennium is inextricably linked with apocalypse, the end of the world, and the messianic fanatics who seek to bring it about. And so although ...”

“... might (as they did) exploit her gesture? Similarly, Labour’s war on the grammar schools may have been politically naive (why end selectivity in the state sector while leaving the private sector untouched?), but it accorded with Williams’s deepest convictions. ‘I have never understood or accepted that some people, through the accident of ...”

“... and approved them. ‘Prediction is dangerous,’ the TLS’s critic conceded, ‘but The Hobbit may well prove a classic.’ A few days later, another anonymous review in the Times endorsed this verdict: ‘All who love that kind of children’s book that can be read and reread by adults should take note that a new star has appeared in this ...”

“... carry on the business of life to good advantage, without learning.’ JOHNSON. ‘Why, sir, that may be true in cases where learning cannot possibly be of any use; for instance, this boy rows us as well without learning, as if he could sing the song of Orpheus to the Argonauts, who were the first sailors.’ He then called to the boy, ‘What would you ...”

“... in October, during what the Israeli Army called its ‘incursion’ – a euphemism inherited from Richard Nixon’s invasion of Cambodia – into towns under the nominal jurisdiction of the Palestinian Authority. Young men distributed dry sticks of olive wood to dip into a barrel of fire. In Arabic and English, white banners proclaimed ‘Jerusalem is also ...”

“... in 1972, assuring her an attentive hearing from Japan’s huge neighbour. Deeper calculations may have been behind her appointment, however. She was prepared to describe the Foreign Ministry, long believed to be without fault, as ‘a hotbed of corruption’. Japan’s ultra-secretive spook outfit, the Cabinet Research Office, is funded by off-budget ...”