“... who appears on our television screens defining the limits of his editors’ freedom. We do not read of attempts by anonymous senior executives at News International to suppress comment or sack editors who have infringed unwritten company policy, but of swashbuckling, tough-talking Rupert. It is Robert Maxwell, not his BPCC, who is perpetually on the ...”

“... had been evinced by several of its members, including Nina Searl, Ella Sharpe, Susan Isaacs, Donald Winnicott and Barbara Low). Ernest Jones, the President and later Freud’s biographer, was enthusiastic (‘absolutely heart-and-soul whole-hogging pro-Melanie’, according to James Strachey). In July 1925 Klein visited London to give a course of ...”

“... new biography, enter his trance, and suddenly transform himself uninhibitedly into Mickey or Donald or an owl or an old hunting dog . . . ‘He would imitate the expressions of the dog, and look from one side to the other, and raise first one brow and then the other’ . . . ‘You’d have the feeling of the whole thing,’ Dick Huemer ...”

“... here. Dr McKitterick remains firmly earthbound. Sometimes this can be useful. It is refreshing to read about Charlemagne’s coronation in Rome without being weighed down by debates on the massive, if nebulous significance of this for the future, but her refusal to accord any real significance to contemporary imperial ideology means that her account of ...”

“... with the demise of the Labour Government, the Communist culprits were hunted down. Guy Burgess and Donald Maclean fled to Russia in 1951; Kim Philby was finally exposed in 1963; Anthony Blunt in 1979. The first three took refuge in Russia. Blunt died in disgrace, deserted both by the Leftist friends of his youth and by the Royal Family and his colleagues in ...”

“... through what was then the conventional musical education – nor, indeed, would he have if he had read Classics at one of the universities. In Germany, he might have gained more insight into historical method by attending a university, but there too, in the mid-century, musical scholarship was in the hands of amateurs – men such as Winterfeld and ...”

“... to be an American, Chris Shull, born in Philadelphia and raised in Maryland. In 1999, long before Donald Trump openly coveted Greenland, Shull was called to preach in a place where there were no Baptists, a place he knew nothing about. ‘I just started praying about a place where God would want me to go,’ he said when we sat down to talk the next ...”

“... Some of these problems are discussed by Brian Whitaker in News Ltd: Why you can’t read all about it. While it is mainly an account of the attempt of the Liverpool Free Press to provide a radical local newspaper (which richly deserved to succeed), it is also a trenchant statement of the radicals’ case against the claim that something ...”

“... say that Floud and McCloskey’s book is indispensable: but, since they presumably wish us to read it because of its substantive contents, that is hardly the point. To limit discussion of what are still recognised as the major themes of the Industrial Revolution to proving that none was as important as was once thought seems a curiously myopic way to ...”

“... Georgian house in Hampstead, 109 Frognal, the home of the blacklisted screenwriter and playwright Donald Ogden Stewart and his journalist wife, Ella Winter. In Frognal, Sayre met Charlie Chaplin (depicted as arrogant, politically obtuse and unfunny), Paul Robeson, W.E.B. Dubois, the left-wing filmmakers Joseph Losey, Carl Foreman and Abraham Polonsky, the ...”

“... difficult: it is poetry almost entirely without charm. On first learning that his work was being read outside a small circle of poet friends, Fisher froze up for an extended period of time, as he would periodically throughout his writing life. There isn’t much in the poetry that would provide fuel for the more significant engines of reputation. It is too ...”

“... sequences: Acrylic Tips is, I think, a truly horrible book, violent, liverish, and unpleasant to read and to write about … garish, lurid, unsettling, and to me full of a vivid and threatening bodily trauma. Not only does it leave me indignant, dumbstruck and annoyed, it makes me feel unwell … For a sequence full of imperative, of the noises of ...”

“... of the subject is the Book of British Birds, and you have a rough idea of what it feels like to read Richard Dawkins on theology. Card-carrying rationalists like Dawkins, who is the nearest thing to a professional atheist we have had since Bertrand Russell, are in one sense the least well-equipped to understand what they castigate, since they don’t ...”

“... landscape that can be expressed as follows: if you want to know what’s happening in the world, read the New York Times. If you want to know what’s wrong with what’s happening in the world, read the Guardian. If you want to know what’s going to happen next in the world (unless tinpot leftists wreck ...”

“... with broken statuary in the desert should have been a warning. Perhaps the execs didn’t read poems or they were enlightened businessmen who embraced impermanence or it was a joke that didn’t land. (Later I found out that Watson had just liked the sound of the word.) Later I was just relieved they hadn’t gone with the runner-up name, Smartini.In ...”