“... Another, more recent antecedent of which Salaman seems to be aware is that of the Australian Peter Carey’s very comparable Bliss (1981), whose ad-man hero Harry Joy revives at the start after being clinically dead for nine minutes, and returns, winded, to his former way of life, deprived of his former breezy ‘optimism’, even suspecting that he is ...”

“... a controversial journalist, taking a strong pro-British line against the pro-French. His pen-name, Peter Porcupine, was famous on both sides of the Atlantic. He became one of the tourist attractions of Philadelphia, remarks George Spater, who does well to tell us so much about the American years – this smart, satirical European journalist provoking the staid ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... He provides the new, as the old, Chronicle with its unforgettable opening tableau in March 1948: Washington D.C. Arriving at the Raleigh Hotel for my appointment with Stravinsky this morning, I find Auden pacing the lobby – in the same suit he wore in a photograph taken a decade ago in China. ‘The night train from Pittsburgh was late,’ he says, ‘and ...”

“... on the insanity of the war project, because the border is, indeed, very close. Birds fly over it. Washington and London need two hundred thousand armed men, billions of pounds, ton upon ton of explosives and the sky dark with aircraft to do what I could have done that quiet afternoon in the desert, driven a few miles up the road under the big tranquil ...”

“... 1949. He took well to the re-establishment of relations with the US and led a party delegation to Washington in 1980. But his later political career points more to a commitment to party discipline than to any reformist conviction. After his stint in Guangdong, he was elected to the Politburo and was again put in charge of dealing with Tibet and ...”

“... illiberal, openly racist state, led by a close ally of Donald Trump, is impossible to stomach. As Peter Beinart wrote in 2010, the Jewish establishment asked American Jews to ‘check their liberalism at Zionism’s door’, only to find that ‘many young Jews had checked their Zionism instead.’The conflict that Beinart described is an old one. In ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... with. As Wendy Chamberlin, the US ambassador to Pakistan, put it, ‘there was no inclination in Washington to engage in a dialogue with the Taliban.’ Miller disputes this. But the US certainly knew its demand that the Taliban hand over the al-Qaida leadership would never be accepted. As Bush himself would later write, it was intended to ‘firm up our ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”