“... of the trip, in letters which contained gothic descriptions of his hand-to-mouth existence. To Paul Semonin, probably his closest friend, he wrote of an eight-day river journey through Colombia: The crew is primitive and vicious-looking and the captain is an old river toad who can’t understand why I’m here and doesn’t much care for it. His daughter ...”

“... which was in fact written by McGeorge Bundy, later national security adviser to Kennedy and Johnson, with input and edits from a number of senior officials intimately involved with the Manhattan Project – was an authoritative counterattack, and it was entirely successful. The message that the bomb had saved a million American lives, in the words of ...”

“... works flooded the market. It was so embedded in the national consciousness that when Samuel Johnson gave his account of parliamentary debates in 1738, he borrowed from Swift’s lexicon, describing the ‘State of Affairs in Lilliput’. The book’s popularity continued beyond Swift’s lifetime, rivalling, as the historian J. ...”

“... Lewis had an affair, came to the conclusion that ‘on the whole, he was half a SHIT,’ while Paul Nash told Lewis that his character was ‘strangely sub-human’. His bellicosity towards those reckless enough to be generous towards him was even fiercer: when a cheque from his patron Fanny Wadsworth didn’t turn up promptly, she received a postcard that ...”

“... When​ Doctor Johnson defined a club as ‘an assembly of good fellows meeting under certain conditions’ he did not mention the essential condition – that each member shall assume that every other member is a good fellow. In practice, of course, it is a law of club life the world over that, apart from very small clubs indeed, no member can know every other member even by sight ...”

“... his paedophilic housemaster. If Williams’s notion does not take sufficient account of the Paul Foots of this world, it also fails to take account of the army of ex-working-class socialists who are not averse to swapping their political beliefs for a Jacobean farmhouse in Kent. Orwell did not get a bullet through his throat in Spain because he was ...”

“... In the spring​ of 1961, Frantz Fanon wrote to his publisher in Paris to suggest that he ask Jean-Paul Sartre for a preface to his anti-colonial manifesto, The Wretched of the Earth. ‘Tell him that every time I sit down at my desk, I think of him.’ For revolutionary intellectuals in the Third World, Sartre seemed miraculously uncontaminated by the paternalism – and hypocrisy – that gave the white left such a bad reputation ...”

“... Lesson of the Master’, Henry St George, the older novelist, offers the young writer Paul Overt a demonstration in self-sufficiency. He tells him a writer would do better not to marry, to put his passion into his work. Then marries the girl they both admire. That doesn’t stop Paul Overt offering an encomium ...”

“... to prohibit such obnoxious views reaching the Australian public. The minister of communications, Paul Fletcher, obliged by instructing major social media platforms to block all content from Russian state media. This attempted act of censorship – a mirror image of the Russian government’s recent shutting down of Facebook and Twitter – was without ...”

“... was headed, in red letters. On the first page was a cartoon labelled ‘LOCKDOWN’, showing Boris Johnson in a white coat, holding a syringe, standing over two masked policemen wrestling to the ground a dreadlocked protestor who’d been holding a placard reading ‘GOVERNMENT LIES’.I skimmed the contents of the leaflet. It seemed a combination of ...”

“... the phrase occurs four times in the one-page foreword to the new Green Paper written by Jo Johnson,the minister for universities and science, and it is repeated over and over again in the body of the document (the NUS counted 27 appearances, topped only by 35 for ‘what employers want’). Its incantation signals official endorsement of consumerist ...”

“... thought about this for some time but my thoughts were focused when I saw Isabelle Huppert in Paul Verhoeven’s 2016 film, Elle. The film begins with a rape about which the victim, Huppert, is ambivalent. This sent the critics, particularly male critics, scuttling to and fro wondering whether it was a feminist, post-feminist or anti-feminist film, or ...”

“... Union’. It was in his Telegraph column, for which he was paid £275,000 a year, that Boris Johnson came out in favour of Brexit in March 2016. (According to Dominic Cummings, Johnson referred to the Telegraph as his ‘real boss’.) A couple of days before the referendum the Telegraph published an editorial ...”

“... and necessary. But on most issues he is a standard issue Republican. He is perfectly at home with Paul Ryan’s austerity agenda, which involves enormous transfers of wealth to the most privileged Americans. He is as committed as any other Republican to repealing Obama’s Affordable Care Act. During the campaign he posed as an apostate on free trade and an ...”

“... Divine Comedy, for example). And the case for imitation is made forcibly by Johnson’s ‘Vanity of Human Wishes’, where Johnson collaborates with Juvenal to create a poem which is modern and therefore original, as well as being part of Classical tradition. Nowadays, some poets feel a slight ...”