“... trip for the tourist, the most fashionable spot for a second residence. London is now closer to Paris than Edinburgh by train; there are some 15 million visits by Britons to France every year, more than from any other country. The vicinity is lulling. Its effect is a countrywide equivalent of the snare against which every schoolchild struggling with French ...”

“... The Life of the Mind, when she had a heart attack walking to the podium. McCarthy rushed over from Paris to help, then was joined from New York by Lotte Köhler, Arendt’s longtime assistant. The following year McCarthy and Köhler were appointed joint executors after Arendt suffered a second heart attack and died in her Riverside Drive apartment.‘The ...”

“... call. You can read about it in Chapter 11 of Moser, or in Alice Kaplan’s Dreaming in French: The Paris Years of Jacqueline Bouvier Kennedy, Susan Sontag and Angela Davis (2012) – highly recommended. From Paris, it was on to New York. Meeting Partisan Review’s co-editor William Phillips at a party, Sontag, now a single ...”

“... and achieved some stature of their own: Jean Strouse in Alice James: A Biography (1980); Ruth Bernard Yeazell in The Death and Letters of Alice James (1981); Howard Feinstein in Becoming William James (1984); Gerald Myers in William James: His Life and Thought (1986); Jane Maher in Biography of Broken Fortunes: Wilky and Bob, Brothers of William, Henry ...”

“... in the view that Eagleton is still a Cambridge man: in his essay ‘The Terry Eagleton Story’, Bernard Bergonzi pointed to the end of Literary Theory: An Introduction, with its expressed preference for ‘specific, living and practical democracy’ over the abstractions of the ballot box (‘specific’ and ‘living’, those Leavisite shibboleths), and ...”

“... difficulties also. They can offer hardly any letters; and how well would we know Henry James or Bernard Shaw without their letters? Macey and Miller even seem not to have been allowed photographs, apart from a jacket-illustration, as though someone had placed a ban on these. At all events one does not, from either of their books, quite end up feeling that ...”

“... not just about policing in America, but school curriculums in Britain, the repertoire of the Paris Opéra, St Nicholas’s assistant Zwarte Piet in the Netherlands, and racial disparities in Covid deathrates across the West.When Chauvin went on trial nine months later, the prosecution was at pains to narrow things back down, and reduce the scope of ...”

“... the same!’ he wrote in a letter) and he persuaded editors, impresarios and lovers of poetry in Paris and London to organise recitals for her. She, in return, found that Mirsky was the only critic worth respecting, not least because he refused to let politics affect his judgment. But politics, of a visionary and quasi-religious kind, were now beginning to ...”

“... seduction of big ideas was internationally infectious. Returning to my hotel lobby I encountered Bernard-Henri Lévy bathed in TV lights, giving an interview to a local network. BHL had just delivered a lecture at the local university about ‘Putinism as Fascism’: ‘Putin is frightened of the loss of traditional values and the principles of ...”

“... in mid-March 2003. Nafisi didn’t support the war, but she thanked its academic architect, Bernard Lewis, in her acknowledgments for ‘opening the door’. The popularity of the book made Nafisi a target – Hamid Dabashi, a Columbia academic, intemperately compared her to Lynndie England – but Reading Lolita in Tehran is political in the way we ...”

“... invite visitors such as Malcolm Muggeridge to a feast of jam puffs, cream cakes and scones. George Bernard Shaw, who corresponded with him in his later years, referred to him as ‘Childe Alfred’. Like a child he was always accusing people of being cruel to him, particularly aggrieved by those who fed him, got bitten and, once bitten, withdrew. He seems to ...”

“... of the novel trying to absorb the consequences of the spectacle; Black Dogs is in part about how Bernard Tremaine, a politician, scientist and rationalist, drifts away from his wife, June (and vice versa), because of what he deems her fanciful, emotional, overdetermined reading of the trauma that was meted out on her in 1946 by the black dogs of the ...”

“... rely on well-known public figures to lend him a cloak of respectability. Figures such as Haines, Bernard Donoughue and Peter Jay, the former British ambassador in Washington – some of the stars of the Labour governments of the 1970s – were happy to be signed up to Maxwell’s payroll. The case of Haines was especially striking: when Maxwell bought the ...”

“... I have a photocopy in my files) that it was not Barbie but a group of Eichmann’s henchmen in Paris who made the decision to send the children to Auschwitz, where they were killed. The final mockery of justice in the Barbie case was the delivery of the judgment – on an indictment of over three hundred points – precisely on the schedule announced five ...”

“... and her doctor felt ‘the time has come when V. must go either to Malmaison [a sanatorium near Paris where she had spent earlier periods of crisis] or to some home.’ Eliot, who paid various medical bills for her, was encouraged by his lawyer, by the doctors involved and by Vivien’s brother to agree to the ‘certification’ that would place her in an ...”