“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... he wrote the same day in a note to Duras, whom he didn’t know. Two days later, he was telling Donald McWhinnie at the BBC, which had just broadcast his first radio play, All That Fall, that Le Square was ‘overwhelmingly moving – to me’, and, he imagined, ‘ideal’ for the Third Programme. McWhinnie agreed and passed the material on to Barbara ...”

“... the naturalist Richard Mabey, who, like Fisher, had known and loved that coast for years. To read Sebald, according to Mabey, was to watch the belittlement of ‘a very close friend’.Fisher’s first book, Capitalist Realism: Is There No Alternative? was published towards the end of 2009, and by 2017 had sold more than 30,000 copies (55,000 and still ...”

“... that anyone else – certainly not such virulent homophobes as Senator Jesse Helms or Reverend Donald Wildmon, who couldn’t consciously allow themselves to see Mapplethorpe’s images as anything other than outrageous pornography – reacted to the photographs in the way Mapplethorpe hoped they would, at least not back in the late 1970s through to the ...”

“... views being tarred as a liberal RINO (‘Republican in name only’). Her offence? Disloyalty to Donald Trump – despite voting the Trump line 93 per cent of the time during his presidency. Disgusted at the way he conjured an insurrectionist mob in an attempt to overturn the election result, Cheney supported impeachment efforts and is vice-chair of the ...”

“... When​ Donald Trump pledged, during his presidential campaign, to ‘begin building a wall’ along the US-Mexican border he was promising to create something that already existed. At the time, more than one third of the border was fortified, in some parts with a single wall, elsewhere with two or even three layers ...”

“... when he talked of the poetry of England; he reacted hysterically to hearing ‘Christabel’ read out to him by Byron at Geneva (see Russell’s Gothic); his poem ‘Oh! there are spirits of the air’ was addressed to the older poet, whom he consciously resembled. One is struck again, on reading the new selection of Coleridge’s letters, by the ...”

“... of the superficial’ was Lord Northcliffe’s advice for tabloid journalists. It’s something Donald Trump appears to understand for himself – and so do the journalists who write about him. Or most of them. Michael Wolff never planned to write a book about the president just as Trump never planned to become president. Wolff remained uncertain about his ...”

“... No doubt many Conservatives in the country and some of the more naive MPs thought that what they read in the Times and Telegraph reflected genuine British Tory views. Regrettably, they did nothing of the sort. The Times, owned by Rupert Murdoch, who was an Australian and is now an American, was as always chiefly concerned with its proprietor’s economic ...”

“... had been set up by the National Trust Visitors Centre, from which the crowds were addressed by Sir Donald Cameron of Lochiel, a descendant of the clan chief who had his feet shot from under him in 1746. This was the usual story: a battle between an old way of life and the new; hence hopeless and worthy of tears alone (descendants of both sides at one in ...”

“... however intellectual or unintellectual, into fervent support of the war effort. According to Donald Keene, some of the Japanese writers ‘who expressed themselves so joyously’ on 8 December 1941 – the day after the attack on Pearl Harbor – probably ‘feared that unless they appeared enthusiastic they might fall under suspicion of harbouring ...”

“... Shakespeare & Company: One evening a crowd gathered in Sylvia’s bookshop to hear T.S. Eliot read some of his own poems. Joyce sat near Eliot, his eyes concealed under his dark glasses, silent, motionless, head bowed a little, eyes closed most of the time, as I could plainly see from my chair a few feet away in the same row, as far removed from human ...”