“... It was not statute which compelled the courts to assist the Tory Government’s suppression of Peter Wright’s allegations in Spycatcher, or to uphold the media ban against Sinn Fein and others holding Republican views. Similar cases can be produced to show an equally creative, and entirely common-law-based, judicial antagonism to the rights of ...”

“... who could afford it they sent them to America. Lucan and his brother and two sisters arrived in Washington in 1940, returning to London in 1945. That episode, his elder sister Jane Griffin told Thompson, was ‘when it all started’. Griffin, one of the members of the family who sympathised with her parents’ politics, has long made her home in New ...”

“... and am astonished when I see on the news in the evening the vast concourse of people gathered in Washington. I don’t read any official estimates of the numbers though it’s to be hoped they estimate more accurately in the US than they do here, where any demonstration of which the police disapprove – the Stop the War marches, for instance – is ...”

“... in Venice in 1546 contained autobiographical material. These documents suggest a personality which Peter Humfrey in his 1997 study of Lotto described as ‘introspective, hypersensitive, often prickly and quick to take offence; but also generous in his affections, tender in his humanity and possessing a quirky sense of humour’. They also make it clear that ...”

“... In 1961, too, Goffman published Asylums, the fruit of his research at St Elizabeth’s Hospital in Washington DC, a vast mental institution with more than seven thousand patients. His study of ‘inmate culture’ and ‘the inmate world’ drew parallels with prisons, conscript armies and concentration camps. Inmates became, in Goffman’s enduring ...”

“... as an agent in the mid-1950s, representing the interests of Humphrey Bogart, Barbara Stanwyck, Peter Lorre, Mary Astor, Joseph Cotten and many lesser lights in the studio firmament. Those of us who knew Clancy – he died in July 2017 in Los Angeles at the age of ninety – can attest that he was a tummler of note, a real-life Zelig who found himself with ...”

“... as their vote-getter, while the new Republicans, descendants of the Federalist Party of Adams and Washington, took their stand on anti-slavery and free labour. ‘I remember once being much amused,’ Lincoln wrote in a letter of 1859, at seeing two partially intoxicated men engage in a fight with their great-coats on, which fight, after a long, and rather ...”

“... and floating five ideas plausibly. Obama keeps a list of his achievements and – according to Peter Baker in a recent New York Times Magazine profile – judges himself to have accomplished 70 per cent of what he hoped in his first two years. Jay Gatsby, too, kept lists, and one may be reminded of Gatsby’s ‘Platonic conception of himself’. The ...”

“... Puzo, Friedman, Brooks and the screenwriter David Zelag Goodman. Kurt Vonnegut began to show up. Peter Matthiessen was considered but rejected for mentioning too often his membership in the Institute of Arts and Letters. ‘It’s an organisation,’ Puzo said, ‘for guys who can’t get screen deals.’ Barring Vogel, the core members all got screen ...”

“... arrival in New York. She insisted on bringing a caged canary with her when invited by Lowell to Washington in April 1948 to record her poetry for the Library of Congress. Bishop came into possession of her most loved pet of all shortly after she settled down with the aristocratic Lota de Macedo Soares in Brazil in 1952. As well as an apartment in Rio, Lota ...”

“... there with them. It’s not significantly less boring in the game than it would be in real life. Peter Molyneux, a brilliant British game designer with a particular interest in ‘God games’ – games in which the player creates a world – had a great notion in a game called The Movies, which came out in 2005. In it the player designs and then runs a ...”

“... once counter-terrorism enabled the overruling of humanitarian principles by security dictat, as Peter Gill explains in Today We Drop Bombs, Tomorrow We Build Bridges: How Foreign Aid Became a Casualty of War.† ‘I am serious about making sure we have the best relationship with the NGOs who are such a force multiplier for us, such an important part of ...”

“... and Patrick Leigh-Fermor, of R.W.Seton-Watson and Rebecca West. Sorties farther afield – like Peter Fleming’s expeditions to the Gobi or Matto Grosso – were fewer. Paradoxically, the vast expanse of the Empire itself was not fertile soil for this kind of writing. There, British power was too close at hand. It generated another set of forms ...”

“... and (it now emerges), against the advice of its officials stationed in Harare, its head office in Washington decided Zimbabwe merited more huge loans. The Harare Government took all the cash on offer and, since then, has had to do what the Bank wants. The Bank crucially fails to recognise that its policies don’t work unless the recipient government believes ...”

“... as one of the brittle porcelain-doll Ladies Who Charity Lunch.Kelley also quotes a 1979 Washington Star editorial on Sinatra, dizzy with its own mock perplexity: ‘That such beautiful music should emerge from such vulgarity is one of the great mysteries of the age.’ Again, just a hint of class sneer: how dare this nouveau riche non-Wasp possess a ...”