“... situations, often having used his wealth to make them happen. In 1931, he was the first to publish John Betjeman, who had been a fellow student at Oxford. In 1933 he financed the final collaboration between Bertolt Brecht and Kurt Weill. When Salvador Dalí was nearly suffocated by the diving suit he wore to the International Surrealist Exhibition in London in ...”

“... Reagan and nominate plain-spoken originalists like Antonin Scalia and Robert Bork. Instead, he took the path described in my previous essay,* and tendered stealth nominees whose public records provided few clues as to future performance. Not that this administration was equally in the dark. During the 1980s, both ...”

“... marksman, but I don’t know of any. Murakami runs marathons; Joyce Carol Oates is also a runner; John Irving wrestles when he isn’t writing. Iris Murdoch often went swimming for pleasure; Nabokov chased butterflies; Graham Greene chased women. Hemingway’s idea of fun was killing big animals in Africa, but when he writes about hunting, always with macho ...”

“... to have been the fleeting ten thousand. Nor did he fail them. Bubbling with pride, he once told John Mortimer in a Sunday Times interview about the prostitutes he had known: ‘I treated them with consideration and like a gentleman. I always let them have their pleasure first. And of course I was enough of a connoisseur to know if their pleasure was ...”

“... Schreiber’s book, was a talker too. Professor Schreiber, who teaches criminology at New York’s John Jay College of Criminal Justice, had to listen to him for six unbroken years before she could begin to write his terrible story. When the 38-year-old shoemaker from Philadelphia was finally arrested in 1975, he and his 14-year-old son Michael had murdered ...”

“... Hamburg’s ruling Senate upheld a nightwatchman model of the state which had more affinities with John Bright’s Manchester than the Kaiser’s Berlin. And Pettenkoferian miasmatism was its medical equivalent: men and miasmas met in the marketplace of the environment. Prudent individuals who took precautions would probably ...”

“... young man is working for the British Council in Blenheim Palace, and being gently patronised by John Betjeman. The sympathetic wicket wasn’t all that hard to find; indeed it might have been less yielding if the suppliant had been a lower-middle-class boy from Leeds. It must be said that some of the writing manages, by avoiding overemphasis, dimming the ...”

“... a man I didn’t like’ were his actual words, he claimed. So when President Calvin Coolidge took offence at a radio impersonation of his speeches, Rogers rushed to make amends. The only time he is on record as using the more familiar tag-line is on a 1926 visit to the Soviet Union. Rogers regretted having missed Leon Trotsky, ‘for I never met a man I ...”

“... their movies in parking lots or off of trucks until they are chased away by the police. The critic John Anderson who has written a book about Sundance calls it ‘a progressive event that recognises the right of every American to get her or his movie on-screen.’ And yet, as Andy Klein, another journalist, complains, Sundance is ‘about as useful’ for ...”

“... But most simply disappeared from my life, as if they meant no more to me than the person who took my toll on the Bay Bridge. Mike Rogin was among those who disappeared. Having burned my bridges, I had no occasion or desire to return to my old haunts, and our paths never crossed professionally. So though we had once been friends, good friends, years ...”

“... the workings of the machine. For those who point out that Corbyn and his shadow chancellor, John McDonnell, already did this – did they? Their 2017 manifesto was radical in terms of spending, but startlingly conservative in its presentation of Britain as an autonomous economy, rather than a few pieces on the extra-jurisdictional patchwork of other ...”

“... of vigour, futurism and ruthless optimism. His son Steffen had a more exotic trajectory, which took him from the German-planned Soviet new town of Magnitogorsk to South Africa. Peter, in his work at Ahrends, Burton and Koralek, designed a series of municipal libraries and university buildings in the 1960s and 1970s in what was then called – though not by ...”

“... 1568, stated plainly by Chief Justice Dyer on behalf of the Court of Common Pleas. The redoubtable John Lilburne, at his trial for high treason in 1649, said to the court: ‘By the laws of England I am not to answer questions against or concerning my selfe,’ and Justice Keble reassured him: ‘You shall not be compeld.’ Dalton’s Countrey Justice in 1618 ...”

“... slab into which is carved a replica of the covenant signed by the 25 male settlers on the St John, which was carrying them to what they thought of as a ‘new world’. In stark contrast, a recent initiative by volunteers to memorialise what is known about the historical presence of enslaved people in the town has resulted in the installation of ...”

“... last month, has him playing an American Secret Service man haunted by his failure to protect John Kennedy on the day everyone remembers. Now another assassin, John Malkovich no less, is stalking another President: a risk for the incumbent but a chance of redemption for our hero. The regrets on the subject of violence ...”