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“... 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 ...”

“... him. Fertile ideas were popping up all over the place in this seedtime of quantum physics. In Paris, in 1923, Louis DeBroglie had put forward the outlandish notion that electrons were both waves and particles. In 1925, Heisenberg began to demonstrate mathematically how this could be possible. By 1926, quantum mechanics, the search for mathematical models ...”

“... entered the First World War. His masters, as he himself acknowledged, were H.L. Mencken and George Bernard Shaw. Even the most ideologically liquored-up combatant in the culture wars of the last couple of decades might blanch at taking them as models. The sobering fact is that, by the time ‘the last intellectuals’ were in their pomp, it was already too ...”

“... as a ‘toucher’ and a man who used to ‘bum off people’. Then he went on: ‘I met him in Paris several times. He was a morose, completely self-contained little man. I was curious about him. I admired certain aspects of his work.’ He told another interviewer that he had letters from Joyce, ‘who asked me some years ago to make some confidential ...”

“... this volume – which is something like an extended pamphlet, on the order, as he says himself, of Bernard-Henri Lévy’s Idéologie française – but rather his more comprehensive Marxism and the French Left (1986), which sets out to tell this story from the 19th century to the present, and not merely, as Khilnani frames it in his book, from the Liberation ...”

“... Klaus Kinski really is a daft actor.’ No one ever used the word ‘daft’ so compellingly. Bernard Jacobson (gallery-owner): Karel wasn’t a collector like you hear about. I always felt the whole thing melded into one: his love of ancient art; ceramics, modern and contemporary art; pickled herring and bagels and smoked salmon and cream cheese with ...”